Best guess has Timberwolves picking Kentucky forward in NBA draft

Flip Saunders isn't tipping his hand about whose name tops the team's wish list heading into the NBA draft Thursday night.

"You're all speculating," said Saunders, head coach and president of basketball operations for the Minnesota Timberwolves.

The Wolves won the chance to select first in the draft — the first time in the team's history — and are hoping their pick will one day help the team contend for a championship.

Speculation centers on 19-year-old Karl-Anthony Towns, a 6-foot-11-inch forward from the University of Kentucky. The New Jersey native played on the Wildcats team that lost to Wisconsin in the NCAA Final Four this year. Towns is considered by many to be the hottest prospect in college basketball this year, ahead of Duke's Jahlil Okafor and Ohio State's D'Angelo Russell.

Towns is already featured on the Wolves web page and has been to Minneapolis to work out for Saunders and team officials.

"He's known right now more of as a defensive player," Saunders said. "He's very much underrated offensively. And if you base things on analytically, he's the top analytical player, when you look at everything he's done on a per-minute basis. So, there's a reason people are looking at him as one of the top players in the draft."

The Timberwolves have been among the first to choose in the NBA draft many times before, thanks to the team's disappointing records over the past many years. That's how they got Kevin Garnett, picked 5th in 1995. He won the NBA's MVP award and carried the team to the conference finals in 2004.

Yet other top five picks, like Wesley Johnson, Christian Laettner, and Derrick Williams have been big disappointments.

This year, though, the Timberwolves got both the worst win-loss record in the league and the rights to the first pick overall. The highest they've picked before is second, in 2011.

And thanks to the Kevin Love trade to Cleveland last year, they've got an even rarer opportunity: the Cavaliers gave the Timberwolves the first pick from the 2013 draft, Anthony Bennett, and the first pick from the 2014 draft, Andrew Wiggins. That'll give the struggling Wolves the players from the top of the NBA draft for three years in a row, although Bennett hasn't lived up to his promise so far and could yet be traded away.

Saunders was clearly relishing the prospect at the Wolves practice facility Wednesday.

"We've made strides. We have a chance to have something special. Based on that, tomorrow should be maybe the best draft day ... this organization has ever had," Saunders said.

Fans can see for themselves how the Wolves will play their draft options at Target Center. That's where the team is hosting a gathering Thursday night to watch the draft televised from Brooklyn.