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Post-trade, here’s what the Wolves have at each position, barring any upcoming roster moves still in the works.

Point Guard:

Randy Foye: The presumptive starter, Foye’s only entering his second NBA season, and has never been a full-time starter so far. Has great potential, but is untested.

Marko Jaric: The “big guard” is a big flop so far, but with Troy Hudson now out of the mix, Jaric’s minutes could go up if he remains with the Wolves, in his role as Foye’s top backup at the point, and a fellow the team might turn to if Foye’s not quite ready for the pressure of the starting role.

Analysis: This is probably the weakest position for the Wolves from a depth standpoint, apart from C, a chronic position of weakness for the team. Foye has plenty of potential and little experience at the NBA level; Jaric has no potential and plenty of experience - all of it bad. Do the Wolves really want to suffer through four more contract years with this stiff?

Grade: C+, due mostly to Jaric

Shooting Guard:

Ricky Davis: Until they trade him, Ricky Davis is the incumbent starter at shooting guard and the most proven scorer on the team … when he decides to play. But with the team’s youth movement and talent at this position, don’t be surprised if Davis is dangled on the trading block and wearing another team’s journey either before training camp opens, or sometime before the trading deadline during the season. If he’s with the Wolves, he’ll be the starter initially, to boost his value in trade.

Corey Brewer: Due to the current numbers game, the Wolves will probably use Brewer as their top sub off the bench early in the season while Brewer acclimates to the NBA, backing up Davis at SG and whoever starts at SF, but he’ll work his way into a starting roll sooner than later. Although he projects better at SF in the long haul, for now he’s a better fit at SG.

Rashad McCants: This is a critical season for McCants. He will either step up his level of play or be facing a future that doesn’t include a Timberwolves jersey. A promising career is in the balance this season, and a combination of competition from Davis, Brewer and Telfair will be the pressure that’s on him. How he responds will determine his future with the franchise. He could extend his chances to make the roster by working on his passing and ball handling skills and move over to point guard, backing up Foye if the team does the common-sense thing and sends Jaric packing - perhaps as an add-in with Davis - to some other team.

Sebastian Telfair:

Of the young, promising players Boston sent to the Wolves in the Garnett trade, Telfair is the least promising. His future with the club could be short unless he finds a way to prove he belongs more than the others at this position.

Analysis: Davis has to potential to score in huge gobs, but is largely inconsistent. Perhaps playing for Celtics West - err, the Timberwolves - will inspire him to light it up on a more regular basis.

Grade: A- for now, but the logjam here needs solving

Small Forward:

Ryan Gomes

I’m guessing, but Gomes looks good to become the starter, though competition between him and Craig Smith will be fierce. That’s because no matter who wins the position, everyone knows that in a season or less, they are just keeping the spot warm for Corey Brewer. Gomes is further along in his development and holds the edge over Smith. But Gomes has only one year on his contract, so unless he and the Wolves work out an extension, the Wolves may not want to disturb Smith’s development. If the club shows potential to win some games, though, it’s Gomes who will start until Brewer’s ready. If Gomes agrees to an extension, it’s all up for grabs.

Craig Smith

Craig Smith is one of the players the Wolves believed to be part of their “nucleus for the future of the club” prior to the trade. He’ll battle Gomes for the right to start this season and eventually be the top backup behind Brewer. The club loves this kid and he holds that as an advantage in that regard, but on-the-court results will determine who wins out.

Gerald Green

Green’s a solid player who can also back up the PF position. He’ll be fighting for minutes with Wolves defensive specialist Trenton Hassell.

Trenton Hassell

Valuable because of his defensive skills, Hassell needs to score better or could find himself out of a job given the new infusion of young talent. He is probably playing out his last contract with the Wolves, despite being a solid, dependable defensive presence.

Analysis: Ultimately, this is where the Wolves want Brewer to play, but right now he doesn’t have the body to play SF at the NBA level, so he’ll get time to bulk up and adjust to the pro game this season. Unless the Wolves choose to force his development along … and why would they, given their post-trade roster situation … this spot will go either to Gomes or Smith and has plenty of depth behind whoever starts.

Grade: B for now, A- once Brewer’s ready to take over

Power Forward:

Al Jefferson

Jefferson probably becomes the de facto starter now that Garnett is on Jefferson’s former team. A talented, promising kid who averaged 14 points and 11 rebounds last season, he has an injury history that limited him before that. When healthy, he’s no Kevin Garnett, but few players are. Still, he’s a respectable starter who likely has room to grow before he reaches his full potential. With all the talent around him, he won’t be expected to put the lion’s share of scoring load on his shoulders the way Garnett was. Maybe a couple years down the road … but not yet.

Juwan Howard

The most dependable veteran PF on the team, Howard’s numbers were down when he was with the Rockets, but he still has some gas in the tank if you’re not looking for him to be a starter. A solid backup to Jefferson.

Mark Madsen

An impact player in brief appearances, Madsen will perhaps miss Garnett more than any other Wolf. Solid on defensive and showing the ability to come up with clutch scoring, if not a lot of it, Madsen’s role has been invaluable over the years. Might be playing his last Wolves contract, though.

Chris Richard

If the Wolves clear roster room to sign Richard, look for him to spend a season in the D-League and eventually get onto the Wolves roster once Madsen runs out his contract and, likely, moves over to Boston to reunite with buddy Garnett. Richard has potential, but needs time to develop; he’ll get that chance.

Analysis: This position, simply due to being filled for 12 years by a 10-time All-Star, can’t be graded anywhere near where it was last season. But Jefferson’s solid with potential to become a stud, and there’s good enough depth behind him at the moment that the impact of Garnett’s departure will be softened a bit.

Grade: B- because of Jefferson’s upside potential, but could plummet if he gets injured

Center:

Mark Blount

Blount has quietly developed into a decent, serviceable center since he arrived from Boston as part of the Szczerbiak-Davis trade. At 7′, he has decent size and isn’t bad at defense, but is limited offensively. Could he step up and show scoring ability now that KG’s gone? On a team with better depth at center, he’d be a backup.

Theo Ratliff

Mr. Cap Relief 2008 doesn’t have much game left, and hopefully Blount can average at least 40 minutes a night to keep Ratliff off the floor. Of course, both Madsen and Howard have the ability to fill in here, and even Chris Richard could be called up from the D-League in an emergency. Ratliff will collect well over $11M to watch Wolves games from the best seat in the house: the bench.

Analysis: Even more than point guard, center is the Wolves biggest weakness. If the Wolves were smart, they’d approach some team like Charlotte that needs more help in the backcourt and offer up Ricky Davis, with Marko Jaric as a required toss-in, for Emeka Okafor. Or at least a combo like Sean May and Jemareo Davidson, to help the Wolves shore up the PF and C positions a bit tighter.

Grade: C-

Despite the weakness at center and point guard, this is actually the deepest the Wolves have looked in years.

Forget those naysayers bashing this trade; this may be a young, inexperienced Wolves team, but they offer a much more hopeful future than the team possessed before the KG trade.

It’s a matter of simple math, really.

The blockbuster deal made to send Kevin Garnett to the Boston Celtics for a half-decent shot at winning a ring, and restoring a future of hope to the Minnesota Timberwolves, has made it almost a lock that the Wolves will be cutting off the heads of a few more players before the summer is done.

Post-KG trade, the Minnesota Timberwolves have 18 players under contract and only 15 spots when you count inactive reserves. That means at least three more heads have to roll by the time the season starts.

One extra head has already rolled; that of PG Troy Hudson. The team was so over T-Hud, they simply bought out the remaining two seasons of his contract, avoiding an optional third year, and saved $2M against the cap in the bargain.

A second head will roll when the Wolves make it official and final that free agent Bracey Wright, who has accomplished nothing as a Timberwolf except play average in the D-League. He played only 19 games at the NBA level last season, 26 games total in his career. The rest of the time, he’s been D-Leaguing it.

That leaves one more head to roll, just to get to the league maximum roster of 15.

Now, the obvious choice, and easiest by cost standards, would be to simply not sign their 2nd-round draft pick from this season, Chris Richard, to a contract, and encourage the kid to play in Europe while they hold onto his draft rights and thin the roster a bit next season. That would be the easy way out.

I have a better candidate in mind; if owner Glen Taylor is really in the mood to take a hit financially, it’s time to call the Marko Jaric experiment a bust. Either trade him to some team for whatever you can get … a 2nd round draft pick would be nice … or buy out his insanely-long, insanely-high-cost contract to, and just be shut of the whole catastrophe.

Whether it’s Richard or Jaric, one more head WILL roll before this is all over. Count on it.

A dozen years into his NBA career and the player with the longest current tenure on any one team has now been moved for the first time in his career: future Hall of Famer, Kevin Garnett, is no longer a Minnesota Timberwolf!

The deal, which give Boston a potent trio of players in Garnett, Paul Pierce and and Ray Allen that could help the Celtics compete in a talent-barren Eastern Conference, gives Minnesota fans something they haven’t had in a while: a team with an open future.

Despite a thrilling Western Conference Finals appearance three years ago, the Garnett-led Timberwolves had spent the past three seasons failing to even make the playoffs. Management decided the time was ripe to “go young,” and Garnett finally agreed to go to a team he wanted no part of before the NBA Draft.

Of course, before the NBA Draft, the Celtics didn’t have Ray Allen to team up with Garnett and Pierce. Now they have all three.

So, what does Minnesota get in return? Well, just about half the Celtics’ team. In fact, it consists of a starting lineup, in number if not in quality, and two first-round picks.

Here’s the lowdown on what the Wolves received:

SG Sebastian Telfair, 22, 6.1 ppg, 1.4 rpg, 2.8 apg
SF Ryan Gomes, 25, 10.1 ppg, 5.6 rpg
SF/PF Gerald Green, 21, 10.4 ppg, 2.6 rpg
PF Al Jefferson, 22, 16 ppg, 11 rpg
C Theo Ratliff, 34, 2.5 ppg, 3.5 rpg
A 2009 Celtics 1st-round draft pick

Also, the future 1st-rounder the Wolves owed the Celtics from the Szczerbiak/Davis trade from 2006 is wiped off the books and returns to the Wolves. All this pick really does is wipe clean a serious blunder McHale made in the past.

All the Wolves didn’t get in the deal was a PG, and the team seems set on Randy Foye as their top option there.

Of this bunch, only Ratliff is really an obvious candidate for being bounced after the 2007-08 season; an aging, unproductive center may add some insurance to the healthy and starting minutes of C Mark Blount, but Ratliff’s advantage is the over $11M that will come off the Wolves’ salary cap burden when they renounce him next summer.

The rest of the four players received are all 25 or younger and have plenty of potential to fit into the Wolves roster. And as far as we know, not a single one has recently been through drug rehabilitation. Imagine that!

Running back Adrian Peterson should end up being like a shot of jura capresso to the Vikings offense this year. Last season, the Vikes suffered from predictability for sure, and this year’s troublesome QB situation and absolute panic-attack at WR could foul things up a bit, but with the Vikes adopting the two-back system employed successfully by a handful of other NFL clubs, the question of predictability is going to decrease this season due to the big increase in talent level at RB that Peterson brings with him.

Hall of Fame Coach Vince Lombardi put it this way: “It doesn’t matter if they know what plays we’re going to run on Sunday. What matters is whether they can stop us.”

Easier to say when the answer is a solid, “No, they can’t stop us.”

The Taylor-Peterson backfield should be sufficient to put the Vikes offense a bit higher on the league-wide ranking than they were last season.

If by some miracle T-Mac finds some confidence… and a couple guys who can catch the darn ball when it’s tossed their way… the Vikes might even climb to .500 or just a bit higher this season. That’d be nice. And overdue.

The Minnesota Golden Gophers may get help from a Tubby Smith recruit sooner than expected. PG Nate Garth, entering his final season this fall at Woodrow Wilson High in Dallas, has been on an accelerated academic path the past couple years and it appears he could be eligible to graduate - and enter the U of M - by January 2008 - in time to take part in most of the Big 10 schedule with the Gophers.

Of course, Garth is hardly the first student to join a college team early due to accelerated academic programs, but it will be the first time in many a moon the Gophers have captured the interest of a recruit so inclined.

The pitfall, however, is that no matter how you spin it, Garth would be giving up a full season of academic eligibility to play about half a season with the Gophers. Is such a sacrifice worth any potential gain? While Tubby may redshirt Garth, he’s already better than any incumbent PG on the Gophers roster, including upperclassmen, and it will only get more difficult to resist playing Garth once he’s on campus if the Gophers struggle prior to the beginning of the Big 10 schedule.

The determining factor is whether Garth can pass a first-semester art class. If so, he’ll be free to join Coach Tubby sooner than expected. Whether that’s ultimately a good thing remains to be seen, especially since adding him as a floor leader could prove disruptive as he would miss Midnight Madness and the first two months of the season. Just as the Gophs might be starting to gel, adding Garth could prove disruptive both to the team and to Garth himself. If that happens, it’s kids curtains for the Gophers for one final season before a Tubby makeover can really start to take hold with the maroon and gold.

Can you imagine a team being so fed up, so disappointed in a player, so determined to give floor time to anyone else, that they would offer to buy out the remainder of his contract? It might seem a bit more common than I’m making out, but that’s exactly what the Minnesota Timberwolves and the agent for PG Troy Hudson are working out as I write this.

Signed for at least the next three years, as well as an option year remaining, the potential parting may not be amicable, exactly, but it is what both sides want. The Timberwolves, overloaded with bad long-term contracts, want to put a tonneau cover over the team’s problems by getting rid of the oft-injured, rarely-consistent Hudson.

Hudson and his agent are willing to part ways because they recognize the backlog at the guard positions; the only sticking point is how much or how little the Timberwolves are willing to pay Hudson to make him a free agent.

Hudson’s side is expecting a big payday, only willing to accept an extremely high percentage of his remaining pay - demanding possibly as much as $17.5M of his $19M+ contract. The Wolves are thinking that since Hudson will be a free agent with a chance of signing on somewhere else, they’d like to pay less; considerably less. Like in the $10M range at most.

It’s unclear at this point if buying out Hudson’s contract would free up and cap room, and when. One thing that’s clear is that Hudson’s departure will, at the minimum, clear off a roster space that can be filled by a big man.

All that talk about Kevin Garnett wanting to flee the Timberwolves after a summer draft in which the Minnesota franchise finally took seriously some trade offers for Garnett before deciding they either didn’t make sense of the Wolves, didn’t offer enough in return, or simply fell through — well, that may not be the case.

The Pioneer Press is reporting that young SG Rashad McCants, one of the players Garnett is closest to on the team’s current roster, is saying that Garnett isn’t interested in playing elsewhere; he wants to remain in Minnesota.

According to that story, Garnett likes being the “king” in Minnesota and despite the PR blowup of trade rumors this summer, apparently has no interest in leaving … now, or next summer, when he would be eligible to opt-out of the final year of his current contract. Of course, it was Garnett who was reported by the press to have mumbled “thank God for opt-outs” during one low point this past season.

Did the network cables between Garnett and Timberwolves management get crossed somehow? It’s a high-stakes gamble for Timberwolves ownership.

If Minnesota feels Garnett is likely to even consider opting out after the 2007-08 season, it would be in the team’s best interest to trade him now and avoid losing him with no compensation at all.

However, if the team chooses to believe Garnett’s desire to not only play out his current contract, but finish his career in Minnesota, two scenarios are possible:

1) Garnett may change his mind and opt-out anyway, or at least refuse to sign an extension, meaning the team could lose him anyway for no compensation, or worse, face trading him next year with the whole NBA knowing Garnett’s leaving in 2009 anyway, making the value of trading for him before then much, much lower.

2) Garnett stays true to his word, and the Wolves can use the Big Ticket to mentor the young core of players they are surrounding him with.

It’s a high-stakes poker game at this point, and Garnett is using Mccants as his stand-in play maker.

I was so disappointed, I held my silence for almost a week now. But now it must be said: the Minnesota Timberwolves and GM Kevin McHale missed their best opportunity to improve the franchise long-term when they failed to come up with a decent deal on Draft Night for perennial All-Star and all-around nice guy, PF Kevin Garnett.

No one wants to see KG leave Minnesota; Garnett is not the problem here. The problem is a different Kevin. But let’s face it: Garnett is the one asset the Timberwolves might be willing to part with whose trade could bring plenty of good value to the franchise, as well as future flexibility.

Sure, it’ll be nice to have Garnett around to train young players how to be real pros, like the newly-drafted SG/SF Corey Brewer and PF/C Chris Richard, as well as folks like the future young core of the Wolves, PG Randy Foye, SF/PF Craig Smith, and SG Rashad McCants.

That’s a nice young group to build around, especially with veterans like C Mark Blount, PF/C Juwan Howard and Garnett to compliment them. Still and all, it’s not as powerful a lineup as it could be.

There’s still plenty of trash to kick to the curb, bad contracts that might be impossible to get rid of, like Marco Jaric, Ricky Davis and Trenton Hassell. But at least the trimming list is getting shorter.

While it’s not a terrible mix, is it a mix that can win a championship? That’s the shadow that hangs over the team. Brewer’s a great piece of the puzzle, but the 185-pound SF whose skinniness makes him a SG for now, isn’t the final piece of the puzzle the Wolves needed to turn 32-50 into 50-32.

Trading Garnett before the draft, for one or two top-10 picks, would have been preferable for the long-term good of the franchise. Along with Garnett, they could have unloaded the Jaric contract, and acquired some much-needed cap relief.

My favorite deal was the one involving Phoenix and Atlanta, which would have resulted in Minnesota getting Atlanta’s picks and some roster-filler in the way of expiring-contract players and young, developing talents.

With Atlanta’s third and 11th pick, as well as their own at seven, word is Minnesota would have been home to even more Gators! They would have taken Horford at the three-spot, naturally, taken Brewer at seven, and then, rumor had it, may have packaged the 11th pick and Icky Ricky Davis to move up two spots, swapping with Chicago to acquire Joakim Noah.

Imagine a T-Wolves squad with Horford, Brewer, Noah and Richard from the two-time national champion Gators, along with assets like Foye, Smith and McCants on board, and a couple vets like Juwan Howard and Trenton Hassell along for the ride. Certainly that would have been enough to make Minnesota into a 10-year dynasty, and enough to make fans forget about trading away a 32-year-old Garnett. That’s the kind of Wolves team that would catch fire so much, Glen Taylor would have to install theater seating just to contain all the foaming-at-the-mouth fans.

But all that is wishful thinking and unfulfilled dreams now. The best the Wolves can hope for is that Chicago catches Garnett fever over the summer or into the season and is willing to trade away Noah, Tyrus Thomas and a 2008 pick in exchange for Garnett.

Otherwise, next summer, Minnesota will likely watch the 12-year Franchise walk away without so much as a Starbuck’s coffee in exchange, once Garnett opts out of the final year of his contract.