In life, you can have too much of a good thing, and the NBA is no exception to this rule. Sadly, the Minnesota Timberwolves had to learn this lesson the hard way. Right now, they have three fantastic centers signed to their team: former all-star Karl-Anthony Towns, defensive mastermind Rudy Gobert, and promising young Naz Reid. From the outside, this impressive depth at the big man position may look like a good thing. However, the many nuances of professional basketball point to this being more of a curse than a blessing.

One problem that Minnesota runs into is how to get all their talent onto the court at the same time. Both Gobert and Towns are too talented to come off the bench, which means that they have had to try and co-exist on the floor together. While the team is only one year into this experiment, the issues have already arisen. Karl-Anthony Towns lacks the agility and quickness to play out on the perimeter as a power forward, yet he is forced to do so because Gobert is an even worse perimeter player. The spacing between the two of them is less than ideal, especially with Towns’ spotty shooting at times. And Naz Reid does not provide a solution to these problems, but instead intensifies them. He is another player who’s best off under the basket, not out by the three-point line. But when you already have Gobert, who has no outside game, and Karl-Anthony Towns, who doesn’t have the pure athleticism to play the four, how can you create lineups that don’t clog the paint?

The other conundrum that this center unit creates lies in the front office. The team just handed Naz Reid a three-year, $42 million contract, which suggests that they are committing to the 23-year-old for the next few seasons at least. That means that between their three main big men, they are shelling out a whopping $443 million in salaries! Towns has already signed an extension with Minnesota that promises to pay him $234 million through the 2027-2028 season, and Gobert still has three years and $130 million on his deals. These are expenses prices to pay for players who do not coexist well together. This has left the Timberwolves in a tough spot. They can’t seem to figure out how to make their center rotation work, but they can’t trade either Gobert or Towns due to their massive contracts that no team wants to take on.

So what are they to do? How can Minnesota find a way to make its trio of centers work, or at least locate some sort of escape clause they can exercise? Well, unfortunately for them, there isn’t an easy answer to this question. Basketball is a game of chemistry and finding out which players fit well together. The team’s best hope currently is that Karl-Anthony Towns and Rudy Gobert figure out how to play well as a duo and that Naz Reid can adapt his game to play next to either of them. If that happens, the Timberwolves will become a dangerous team out west, especially with the emergence of Anthony Edwards. However, the more likely scenario at this point is that they move on from Towns or Gobert, and they find a trade partner willing to eat the massive salary of either player. Accomplishing this will be easier said than done, but that seems to be the most realistic solution to Minnesota’s logjam at the center position.