WRG Mock Draft: #18, Minnesota Timberwolves

Jefferson, Love, Gomes, Foye, Brewer and (probably) Telfair. That's our entire roster going into 2010-11.

Here are the first five things you don't see on that list --

1. A Center
2. A starting PG
3. Size in the backcourt
4. Size in the frontcourt
5. Some kind of plan if Foye is injured

So we have a lot of work to do. We don't see a lot of free agents lining up to play in Minneapolis, so the way we improve is through trades and the draft.

Lucky for us, there are a lot of teams out there who covet expiring contracts, which we are in a position to offer in trade. We think we are on the right side of this market as there seem to be a lot more sellers out there than buyers.

We also have a bunch of draft picks - and we addressed a huge need with our first pick, landing a nice young PG with size.

So we have options when it comes to plugging our holes, but we don't see a lot of great options for doing so with this pick. We would love to have an above-the-rim athlete for our frontcourt or a legit big man, but our board has none of the former at this point in the draft and only one of the latter - and we consider him a huge project that is so far away from contributing that we would need to acquire a mediocre player to bridge the time gap so we don't have to actually play him. For us, that's hardly ideal.

So we go to the top of our board and take a guy who is a good prospect with skills we can use right now. We don't think we can get a young guy with this much potential any other way, and we think that his top-tier height at SF will help our vertically-challenged frontcourt rotation with matchups.

The Minnesota Timberwolves select Austin Daye.

"Eat it, Morris. I'm moving to Minnesota!"

The Atlanta Hawks are on the clock.

WRG Mock Draft: #6, Minnesota Timberwolves

The Timberwolves are not thrilled with how this draft has gone.

We need a center to make our franchise player's life a little easier, but we only liked one in the whole draft - and he's predictably gone.

There was a flashy guard we thought would be perfect alongside Randy Foye. Maybe we even tried to trade up to get him. We don't want to make our pick feel unwelcome, though - so we'll deny that if you ask.

Then we decided that a versatile guard with a killer jump shot would be a great fit for us and a very nice compliment to the inside attack of Jefferson and the strong driving game of Foye.

Eh. That last pick threw us a bit.

So we have the sixth pick and now are working on our fourth choice.

But all is not lost! We liked Stephen Curry because of his maturity and his jumper - but there were also things we didn't like. He and Foye would make a small backcourt. We had durability concerns with him. More importantly, though, we thought he was the safe choice. We believed he would be good for us, but we had a lingering feeling that we could regret not taking a player with the potential to be better.

So we now look to a versatile guard who has ideal size, the smarts to play in any system, and can handle the ball and run our offense. We don't think of him as a combo guard like the other choices. We think he's a pure point that can also be effective playing off the ball when Foye is drawing fouls at the end of quarters. We also feel he is a plus defender and rebounder, which we need. We see signs his jumper can come around. We hope it does.

The Minnesota Timberwolves enthusiastically select Jrue Holiday. We're sure this will work out just fine.

That's right. You're number six!

The Golden State Warriors are on the clock.