As the recently deposed Sam Hinkie can tell you, rebuilds depend on brainpower and vision, but in the end, luck decides a lot. Hinkie lost his bottoming out gambit in part because he didn’t seem to understand the dysfunction he would cultivate by treating players like spreadsheet figures and a basketball team like an asset farm, but he also suffered at the hands of the lottery ping pong balls he accumulated with fetishistic verve. Had the Sixers’ all-out putrescence blitz landed them the number one pick in either the 2014 or 2015 draft, they would have Andrew Wiggins or Karl-Anthony Towns and Hinkie would probably still have some rope left with his ex-bosses. Instead, the Sixers have a decent shot at Brandon Ingram or Ben Simmons, with Bryan Colangelo lying in wait to provide either of those guys with overpaid, insufficiently talented supporting casts.

By contrast, the late Flip Saunders looks like a personnel genius because he held off on trading Kevin Love until the suddenly with-LeBron Cavaliers offered him Wiggins—which was a sharp move—and because the Lottery Gods were kind enough to gift him Towns in the late spring of 2015. Saunders left the Wolves in a great position before his untimely death, but as is always the case when a youth movement takes off, it had as much to do with fortune as expertise.

Now, the Wolves have reached the point in their rebuild where, if they nail their next decision, there’s no ceiling on how great they can be. They have a franchise player in Towns, a promising second banana in Wiggins, and Zach LaVine, who some nights looks like he time-traveled into the past from 2046 to show us what basketball looks like in the future and some nights looks like a supremely athletic klutz. There’s cap space available if the front office wants to use it. There isn’t a ticking clock involved, because everyone worth a damn on the roster is young and under franchise control for a long while. Crucially, management resisted the temptation to keep Dumbo ear suit jacket connoisseur Sam Mitchell on the sidelines any longer than necessary. This team needs a good coach, and if the Wolves choose one, they’ll be set up to soar over the next few years.

Recent NBA history instructs us that this is easier said than done, and getting it wrong can have dire consequences. During the LeBron Era 1.0, Mike Brown molded the Cavs into one of the league’s stingiest teams, but his nonexistent offensive imagination birthed thousands of pick and rolls that went nowhere if LeBron couldn’t solve the defense by himself. This deficiency became exceedingly clear some three years before Cleveland fired Brown in a last-ditch effort to keep LeBron in wine and gold.

Scott Brooks somehow lasted nearly seven full seasons in Oklahoma City despite never quite figuring out how to jigger his rotations so that either Kevin Durant or Russell Westbrook was on the court at all times. Brooks discovered Kendrick Perkins was unplayable about 18 months later than the rest of the basketball world, and he didn’t seem to have much of a grasp on crafting out-of-bounds plays or how to get his stars easy shots in the dying minutes of games. What kept him employed in OKC appeared to be a combination of ownership miserliness and the fact that Durant and Westbrook genuinely liked the guy. Those factors conspired to ensure the Thunder were out-strategized in every important playoff series they played from 2009 to 2014, and it put them in the pickle of installing first-time NBA coach Billy Donovan in the same season they’re trying to retain Durant.

The Warriors were prescient enough to realize that Mark Jackson, while competent, wasn’t an agile enough coach to get them where they wanted to go, so they fired him in the summer of 2014. The Dubs’ dramatic rise over the past two seasons isn’t primarily down to Steve Kerr, but he’s made some tweaks—embracing small ball, moving Draymond Green to the starting lineup, marginalizing David Lee, using Andre Iguodala as a utility man off the bench—that hint at a keen understanding of how to emphasize his players’ skills and hide their weaknesses. Kerr’s open-mindedness and humility have allowed him to experiment and spot opportunities Jackson was blind to.

It’s a whit troubling that the Wolves have brought in Mark Jackson for an interview, but they’ve also talked to Jeff Van Gundy and Tom Thibodeau. It appears they’re putting a lot of thought into who’s going to be in charge of stewarding the development of Towns, Wiggins, LaVine, and whomever they select in the draft this June.

For me, Thibodeau is the obvious choice of the names that have been floated. He has his peccadilloes, but his main failings during his Bulls tenure were clashing with inferior basketball minds in management and not being able to keep Derrick Rose’s legs structurally intact. He’s a brilliant tactician defensively, and he doesn’t get enough credit for puzzling out how to make his often-depleted Bulls squads function on offense. Thibs wants organizational control—probably because he got burned by not having it in Chicago—and that’s an unknown because he’s never been in charge of personnel before, but he won’t be building the roster from the ground up so much as augmenting it over the coming seasons. Someone who watches as much film as he does would seem, at least at first glance, to be as qualified as anyone to identify the right sorts of role players to complement Towns and Wiggins.

Luck will surely play into the outcome of this decision, too. Maybe the Wolves hire Jackson, he learns from his mistakes in Golden State, and the team finds a new level. Maybe Thibodeau is brought aboard and turns out to be a terrible general manager. Maybe some relatively obscure assistant gets the gig and is a perfect fit for what they’re trying to accomplish. But what’s clear is the Wolves are about to decide where their future is headed in a major way in the coming weeks. The wrong move sinks them; the right one makes anything possible.