The line of excoriation started to the right.

No luau pig was roasted as thoroughly as the Bulls were on Draft night 2017, after they traded Jimmy Butler and the 16th pick overall to the Timberwolves for Kris Dunn, Zach LaVine and the 7th pick overall in the first round. The conventional wisdom was that Minnesota was not only getting the best player in the deal, but the Bulls weren’t getting anyone of significance in return. Meanwhile, the Wolves were putting together a contender in the rugged West, with Butler joining Karl-Anthony Towns and Andrew Wiggins to form a potential triple-headed hydra that could be as good as anyone’s outside of Oakland.

And, despite a knee injury that limited Butler to 59 games, precipitating a near collapse down the stretch, the Wolves made the postseason on the final day of the regular season, beating the Nuggets in an overtime, winner-take all meeting at Target Center. The win broke the longest postseason drought -- 13 years -- in the NBA. The Wolves weren’t perfect -- they were quickly dispatched by Houston in the first round -- but at least they were finally going in the right direction.

Steve Aschburner has the latest from Media Day on the Jimmy Butler situation.

Less than five months later, the dreams of sustained playoff appearances and building a true contender again in the Land of 10,000 Lakes have dried up. Climate change was not the culprit -- unless you count the dark cloud that Butler has cast over the franchise.

His decision to demand a trade -- a demand that is apparently going to be honored by Wolves owner Glen Taylor -- has again brought uncertainty to a franchise desperate for stability, one that tried gamely to change the subject by announcing Towns’ long-expected max contract extension on Sunday, all but skywriting over Paisley Park: Karl-Anthony is our future. Don’t worry. All is well.

And Towns may be that good. At the least, he’s the best Minnesota can put out there every night.

But the Wolves were expecting so much more out of Butler’s time in Minnesota than a hurried restart 14 months later.

Butler was supposed to represent a permanent turning of the corner, a final and lasting shift from the losing culture that Tom Thibodeau had been given free reign to smash when he was named coach and team president in 2016. Thibs’ insistence on bringing back “TimberBulls” from his Chicago days -- Taj Gibson, Butler, Derrick Rose -- were viewed more benignly as instilling tough-minded vets who knew what it took to grind out wins and make the playoffs as long as Butler was Thibs’ voice on the floor and in the locker room.

Tom Thibodeau's plans of a rebuild in Minnesota are taking a hit due to Jimmy Butler's trade request.

And Butler had no problem getting his point across.

“On paper. I don’t think we play hard enough right now,” Butler told me in February. “I don’t think we guard the way we’re supposed to in order to win. There are a lot of things that we have to be better at, night in and night out, no matter if the opponent is home, away, neutral. No matter what the start time is. You’ve got to play hard. We do not do that.”

Even then -- the Wolves would beat the Lakers the next night to enter the All-Star break at 36-25, with Butler joining Towns in Los Angeles as Western Conference All-Star representatives -- there was the scent of discontent in the air. As mentioned above, Butler was already grinding on his young teammates to give more effort defensively, the way he seemed to grind on people in Chicago -- including, ironically, Rose, who would soon be his teammate again. But by that time, Rose’s injuries had muted his voice throughout the Chicago organization. (You can’t make demands when you’re no longer The Man, so to speak.) Friction between Butler, Wiggins and Towns, long rumored, was made clear in a report last week by The Athletic Minnesota’s Jon Krawczynski.

Jon Krawczynski of The Athletic joins GameTime to talk about Jimmy Butler's future with the Timberwolves.

Yet Butler would have likely stayed had Minnesota acquiesced to his push for a max deal -- but not just any max.

What Butler wanted Minnesota to do going into the summer was a "renegotiation/extension” of his current deal. He was eligible this summer -- the fourth anniversary of his signing his current deal in 2014 -- for an R/E. (The Rockets gave James Harden an R/E last year, for an additional $170 million through 2023 on top of the $68 million remaining on his existing deal.) It would have required Minnesota to trade out significant salary without taking anything back in return. (The only realistic trade options at the time, as the Wolves had just committed $146 million to Wiggins, were Gorgui Dieng -- whom Minnesota has made available in the past, and who the Wolves are reportedly attaching Butler now -- or Gibson.)

As a player with between 7/9 years’ experience, Butler was eligible for a maximum of approximately $32 million in 2018-19,105 percent of this year’s 7-9 year max deal ($30.560M). Butler makes $20.4 million this coming year, so the Wolves would have had to create $11.1 million in additional cap room to give to Butler, then work off his “new” number of $32 million to extend him out four more years after that, through 2023. That would have given Butler, in essence, a new five-year deal worth $185.9M.