National Basketball Association

Wolves announce affiliation with D-League's Fort Wayne Mad Ants

Updated Mar. 4, 2020 10:28 p.m. ET

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MINNEAPOLIS -- The Timberwolves officially announced Monday their already assumed affiliation with the NBA D-League's Fort Wayne Mad Ants.

But players whom coach and president Flip Saunders assigns to the NBA's minor league won't necessarily play in Fort Wayne. If there isn't room on the Mad Ants' roster, they'd either be chosen by another D-League team or assigned there by the league.

With every D-League organization save for Fort Wayne serving as an exclusive affiliate for one NBA team, Fort Wayne now has 13 big-league franchises to serve. Current roster rules dictate a maximum of four NBA players or two NBA players at the same position are allowed at any point in time.

"That poses some interesting challenges," Ants coach Conner Henry told FOXSportsNorth.com in a recent interview.

Each of the past two offseasons, Minnesota's D-League affiliate has spurned the Wolves (and some of their NBA contemporaries) for an exclusive relationship with an NBA club. The Grizzlies entered into a partnership with the Iowa Energy following the 2013-14 season, and the Sioux Falls SkyForce announced last summer they'd become the one-to-one farm team for the Heat.

Short of further expansion, every NBA team without such an affiliate -- Minnesota, Atlanta, Brooklyn, Charlotte, Chicago, Denver, Indiana, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, New Orleans, Portland, Toronto and Washington -- will send their players to and from Fort Wayne, a town of about 260,000 in Indiana's northwest quadrant.

The leagues are patiently moving toward a model in which every NBA club has its own D-League team. That opens up a plethora of possibilities, including an expanded draft, a more rewarding salary system that keeps talent from developing overseas and a more centralized platform for player development.

For now, the NBA and D-League will operate under a "flexible assignment" system. If the Wolves -- or any other Ants affiliate -- assign a player to the D-League at a time when Fort Wayne is already maxed out on NBA players, the league will attempt to identify another D-League squad interested in accepting the assigned player. If it can't, the league will assign said player to one of the non-NBA-owned, single-affiliate D-League teams.

With the league moving more and more toward one-to-one relationships similar to the NHL and Major League Baseball -- minus the many levels of competition -- it could create some unique circumstances for the Mad Ants, who won last year's D-League championship.

"I've got to make that kid (sent down by an NBA club) not only successful individually but successful as the team goes and get him acclimated and try to play some basketball that's cohesive and successful," said Henry, in town Sept. 6 for an open Mad Ants tryout. "There are going to be challenges this year."

For their part, Saunders and Wolves owner Glen Taylor have expressed interest in establishing an exclusive D-League partner in Minnesota. Taylor's hometown of Mankato or a place like Rochester, Saunders said, could allow players to practice with the Wolves during the day and play in a home D-League game that night.

"We hope it's going to keep on expanding," Saunders told the D-League website at the NBA's Las Vegas Summer League in July. "I really believe when we get to a point when we have 30 D-League teams . . . that's when you've really arrived. That's the next step."

The Wolves could maintain full ownership and operation of a D-League team or enter into a hybrid agreement with independent ownership and business operations whose basketball operations are controlled by the NBA affiliate. The Energy and Grizzlies are operating under that type of setup, though a group of minority Grizzlies owners bought up the team in Des Moines, Iowa.

That destination proved useful for Minnesota once last year, when Shabazz Muhammad averaged 24.5 points and 9.8 rebounds during a four-game, midseason stint. He was one of a record 62 NBA players and 10 first-round draft picks assigned to the D-League in 2013-14.

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