After a 149-day lockout the NBA’s owners and players have come to a preliminary agreement that will allow NBA basketball to occur in the 2011-2012 season. The deal is to become official early next week and soon after the season’s schedule will be released.

After missing time, the season will be shortened down from 82 games to a manageable 66 game season. In traditional 82 game seasons, teams averaged 3.2 games a week and with a more condensed season teams will be playing 3.9 games a week. That is an additional two games a month over the course of the season.

Teams’ training camps start on Dec. 9 and the season is scheduled to begin Dec. 25 with a platter of premium games for Christmas Day including a Finals rematch of the Miami Heat and the Dallas Mavericks.

But what matters to Minnesota fans is that the Timberwolves are back. The team’s roster is shaped with many of the same names from the 2010-2011 roster but the team did make one major off-season acquisition. That was finally signing 2009 first round draft pick Ricky Rubio.

Many doubted that Rubio would ever don a Wolves jersey as fans predicted that the Spanish sensation would demand a trade, likely with a large market team. Rubio was in fact signed and finally will be paired with Kevin Love in the NBA’s most fundamentally sound duo. Neither may be able to dunk, but there will be a multitude of outlet passes and finger-rolls to go around.

Barring a trade before the seasons start, Love and Rubio will be surrounded in the starting lineup by second-year shooting guard Wesley Johnson, last year’s starting small forward Michael Beasley, and assuming Darko Milicic has not been on a strictly cheeseburger diet during the off-season he also will return to his role as the teams starting center.

Free agency starts next Friday, Dec. 9 and could adjust the Wolves’s roster slightly being as the team has one of largest discrepancies between their payroll and the league’s new salary cap.

The recent Collective Bargaining Agreement establishes a minimum salary expectation that is 85 percent of the salary cap. This was implemented along with a harsher luxury tax for those teams over the salary cap. By adding a salary minimum and harsher taxes on the teams willing to spend, the league hopes to see a more balanced playing field between small market teams like Minnesota and the larger markets like Los Angeles and their Lakers.

Another concession made by the player’s union was made directly in benefit to small market teams such as the Timberwolves. Contract length was shrunk to four years during unrestricted free agency when it previously was seven years. The new agreement also allows teams to pay their own players at a higher margin than the player would receive in a competitive free agent market.

This is particularly relevant to Kevin Love; the Timberwolves can offer Love a maximum contract extension for five years at 79.015 million dollars where any other team can only offer Love a four year contract worth 58.199 million dollars.

Even if Kevin Love is not a fan of Minnesota’s sub-zero winters, his 21 million additional guaranteed dollars is quite the incentive for Love to remain the face of the Timberwolves franchise. If Love accepts that contract the Timberwolves, who already have Rubio under contract through the 2014-2015 season, have a chance at bringing professional basketball back to relevance in Minnesota.