Minnesota Timberwolves Kevin Love Injured - What does this mean?

The Minnesota Timberwolves are not a very successful franchise. They were already looking at starting this season without their absolutely all-adorable 1st team point guard Ricky Rubio, but made a lot of good moves on paper this off-season. The T-Wolves were already a fun team to watch, and became the absolute darlings of Basketball Twitter - despite having not played a single NBA game yet this season. Well, things just got worse for them -- their All-Star / Olympian Kevin Love just broke his hand lifting weights. Yes, he's not quite Karl Malone or Enes Kanter in the weight room -- but he was undoubtedly the best bigman (PF or C) last season in the entire NBA, statistically.

He is supposed to miss 6-8 weeks. That's bad, because Rubio is supposed to miss some time too. What does this mean for the T-Wolves? Well, I looked at their schedule and figured it out . . .

I think Love will be back in 5-6 weeks. But if he takes as long as 9 to be out it could look bad.

For those wanting to know how this compares to if they were healthy here you go.

Of course, this is my estimation of how things could turn out. I think missing 5-6 weeks will mean between 3 to 6 extra losses. In the tough Western conference this could mean the difference between the playoffs and lottery. And if Love and Rubio both miss 8 weeks of action from this date, their team would have lost an extra 7 games than they should have, had they been healthy. That's the difference of a 71.4 win %, and a 38.1 win %.

Bad injury to have, I am a fan of Love's game. I hope he gets well soon. I'm not a fan of the Timberwolves, but I've selected them to be on my league pass thingy. Brandon Roy and Andrei Kirilenko will be asked to do more, early this season. Which may not be the best for them late in this season.