How the Minnesota Timberwolves squandered Kevin Garnett's prime, then lost him

- In 2004, the Minnesota Timberwolves finally competed for an NBA championship and the timing was perfect. In 1995, Minnesota executive Kevin McHale accomplished this by recruiting elite power forward prospect Kevin Garnett and

then

hiring his friend Flip Saunders to coach the youngster. This is team owner Glen Taylor. He didn't really help, he's just very rich. Still, even with a rising superstar and a well-regarded young coach, the Wolves didn't win a playoff series during KG's first eight seasons. But finally, in 2003, just before Garnett's record contract was about to expire, McHale gave his centerpiece a team worth staying with. Sam Cassell, an aging but tenacious point guard with championship experience, who became a first-time All-Star in his first season helping KG.

Latrell Sprewell, another newcomer in his 30s, but still the perfect animated slasher to congratulate Garnett from the sidelines. Coach Saunders and his new big three also had a decent supporting cast, such as bucket generator Wally Szczerbiak, and two late players the Wolves had plucked from obscurity, point guard Troy Hudson and defensive specialist Trenton Hassell. Although injuries depleted Minnesota's depth in 2004, the big three were enough to make a good team great. Garnett won his first league MVP,

then

led the franchise to its first playoff success, a decisive series win over rookie Carmelo Anthony and the Denver Nuggets, then a grueling seven-game loss to the dangerous Sacramento Kings. crowned by a KG masterpiece.

The parade of unprecedented successes only stopped at the feet of the tough but unsuccessful L.A. Lakers, who survived Minnesota in the 2004 Western Conference Finals. But Los Angeles would soon crumble, creating a power vacuum in the Western Conference. This newly built Minnesota power looked poised to fill that void and advance even beyond the conference finals in the years to come. Or Kevin Garnett's Wolves would never make the playoffs again. The safest thing to come out of the 2004 playoff race was Garnett. Before the season began, he had correctly evaluated the team around him as top-tier and signed a five-year, $100 million extension.

This was Garnett's second major contract. The previous one, because of its magnitude and timing, had helped scare away Garnett's initial co-stars. Young point guard Stephon Marbury felt undervalued and finally pushed for a trade. Tom Gugliotta found it all uncomfortable and signed elsewhere. And one more thing from the past: In 2000, the Wolves were caught trying to get around the salary cap to pay free agent Joe Smith. The NBA penalized them by taking away a large number of future draft picks. This data helps explain why Garnett and Saunders didn't win a series until 2004. It can also help us understand what happened after the playoffs in 2004.

The 2004-2005 Wolves had basically the same roster that took them to the playoffs. conference, but it was not that simple. Unrestricted free agent Troy Hudson returned only after a lengthy negotiation. Restricted free agent Trenton Hassell had thrived during Wally Szczerbiak's extended injury absence and took advantage of a fairly substantial offer sheet from the Portland Trail Blazers. The Wolves chose to match it and keep Hassell. It was a lot of money to commit to top bench players, but Hudson and Hassell were more than just serviceable shooters and defenders. They were close to Garnett. Team owner Glen Taylor would later improperly blame them for profiting from that fact.

It wasn't just free agents eager to cash in on the success of 2004. Cassell and Sprewell, still under contract, said, "Hey, we had great years." We are close to Garnett and we are his real co-stars. "We want large extensions." The Wolves looked at Cassell and saw a man about to turn 35, coming off surgery for a hip injury that cost Minnesota dearly in the Western Conference Finals. They weren't going to pay. Cassell skipped training camp briefly to express his displeasure before moving on to the remaining two years of his contract. Sprewell was louder. The Wolves offered him an extension, but at about half his asking price.

Sprewell went public with a now infamous quote. "Why would I want to help them win a title? "They're not doing anything for me. "I'm at risk, I'm at a lot of risk here. I have to feed my family." That was an overreaction and, unsurprisingly, so was the media response. Sprewell, like Cassell, entered camp without an extension. So the band was back together, but the pressure was up and the vibes were off. Now that everyone was healthy, Saunders had more minutes and his egos needed touches. Cassell and Hudson needed minutes at point guard. 'rotation options the previous year.

He now regularly changed the starting lineup. Perhaps related, Saunders was unable to stimulate the previous season's effort and organization on defense, which had been one of the most efficient defensive teams in the league. It's difficult to diagnose poor performance from a relatively unchanged roster, but observers were quick to point the finger at Cassell and Sprewell, both still complaining about their contracts, each of whom produced considerably less than they had in their first year as Wolf. Hudson had his nice new contract, but also new injuries and complaints. The frontcourt rotation around Garnett had been a weak point even during the playoff success, and it remained a problem despite the addition of young Eddie Griffin.

After a prolonged injury absence for Cassell and a couple of long losing streaks, the club, coming off a 58-win season, fell below the .500 mark. Wally Szczerbiak compared the slide to a bad dream. Wolves owner Glen Taylor ordered his general manager to do something to wake up the Wolves, so McHale fired the coach. Firing the coach is pretty typical of a regressing team, but this firing was particularly tense. Flip Saunders was a Minnesota fixture. He had been McHale's college teammate and Garnett's mentor since he was a teenager. This was a big change. McHale was named interim coach and got Minnesota back into the win column, but not enough.

The 2004 first-place finish in the West failed to make the 2005 playoffs. Garnett's cranky teammates received most of the negative headlines, but the man in charge also received some of the blame for messing up the offseason finances in a way which left everyone in a bad mood. In any case, 2005 would not be another summer of setbacks. McHale didn't want to do two long-term jobs, so he hired Seattle assistant Dwane Casey for his first job as an NBA head coach. With his first lottery pick in a long time, McHale selected North Carolina's Rashad McCants. He's not bad, considering the options, although one of those options was future All-Star Danny Granger.

Sprewell's contract expired and the Wolves no longer wanted to retain him. The new free agent received such unsatisfactory offers from other teams that he finally retired, just one season after rejecting the Wolves' three-year extension. So one crucial part of the greatest Wolves team of all time is gone, and McHale gets rid of another. In August, Minnesota traded Cassell and a future pick to the Clippers for Marko Jaric, a promising young but injury-prone lead guard. Just to settle this, Jaric stayed healthy in Minnesota, but he was nowhere near the super-versatile game-changer McHale promised. Meanwhile, the much older Cassell had a major bounce-back year and helped lead the Clippers to their first postseason success in a long time.

So Minnesota gave away the most productive player in the deal and a future protected lottery pick, which would haunt the franchise until the protection ran out for the 2012 draft. He's kind of a spoiler, but yeah. McHale made the Cassell trade hoping the Wolves would improve again soon. They didn't, it was a terrible trade. But at least the Wolves kicked some free agent ass... No, his biggest new signing was notorious draft bust Nikoloz Tskitishvili. I'll go to my grave believing Skita could have been a good NBA player, but he wasn't, and Minnesota abandoned him after he played five games.

So yeah, the 2005-2006 Wolves were stinking shit. With a rookie coach and a stripped-down roster, their once-elite offensive production plummeted to match their sagging defense. But it took another deal to really sink the ship. In January, the Wolves joined a big, ugly trade yard sale. The Wolves' headline was losing Wally Szczerbiak, their only scorer besides Garnett, and acquiring Ricky Davis, who was a funnier and slightly worse version of Wally. A team that was around .500 before the 2006 trade completely collapsed after it. The Wolves' 33-49 season record was the worst since Garnett's youth. Every piece except the center piece had become worse.

But hey, all those losses gave the Wolves a high lottery pick, their best chance at landing Garnett a new young co-star. And with the sixth pick in the 2006 NBA Draft, the Minnesota Timberwolves selected Brandon Roy, the future Rookie of the Year, a future superstar guard, an excellent potential partner for KG, had the Wolves not preferred the vastly inferior Randy Foye. McHale was so determined to trade Roy for Foye that the Blazers were able to force the Wolves to trade with them. Roy helped lead the Blazers' turnaround. Foye didn't do that for Minnesota, he was fine. Once again, the Wolves started the season well, thanks to their lone star.

Once again, the bottom fell apart after a mid-season move. This time it was McHale who fired Casey and promoted Randy Wittman to head coach in January 2007. Minnesota was 20-20 on Casey's last day. They finished 12-30 the rest of the way under Wittman. So back to the lottery, where the Wolves passed on future Defensive Player of the Year Joakim Noah in favor of his smaller, worse Florida teammate, Corey Brewer. Of course, Noah would have been a bad fit next to Garnett, but about that... Towards the end of the Wolves' losing season, McHale said the team wasn't planning to trade Garnett, but Minnesota knew KG could opt out of his deal. contract. after one more season, and they feared losing the best player in franchise history for nothing.

By draft night in 2007, McHale had spent a lot of time on the phone discussing trades, a proposition complicated by Garnett's ability to scare away trade partners he didn't like simply by saying he wouldn't sign an extension with them. Garnett was very excited about a move to the Phoenix Suns, a fun and talented team in a city with much better weather than Minnesota. There was also interest from the Lakers, who were trying to find a way forward with their own star, who was unhappy. But McHale didn't want to hand Garnett to a Western Conference rival, and especially not the Lakers, whom he had come to hate in his time as a Celtic.

McHale went further in trade talks with, well, the Celtics, led by his former teammate Danny Ainge. Ainge was willing to give up basically all of Boston's young players for KG, and McHale was interested, but Garnett was not. Just before the draft, agent Andy Miller made it very clear that his client would not sign an extension if he was traded to Boston. But things changed. Among other things, the Celtics acquired Ray Allen. Garnett wanted to compete, and a potential core of his own, Allen and Paul Pierce, certainly sounded like contenders. In late July, Garnett agreed to commit to Boston long-term and a deal was finalized, Garnett for this array of interesting young players and expiring contracts.

To make room for this huge infusion of prospects, McHale waived Hudson and traded Hassell, the last vestiges of the great 2003-2004 team he had built. Well, except for Mark Madsen, he was still there. Oh, hello Marcos. Months after the big trade, Kevin Garnett became an NBA champion. Months after the big trade, the Timberwolves finished their worst season in a decade and things would only get worse. None of the prospects Minnesota got for Garnett turned out the way they expected. Al Jefferson had some strong seasons before injuries slowed him down, and a few other guys were okay, but that core never amounted to anything.

Minnesota spent the next decade playing the lottery with mixed results. McHale made a smart trade for rookie Kevin Love in 2008. McHale returned to coaching later that season, but this time he relinquished his front-office position.major. Before the 2009 draft, McHale was ousted entirely after a long career with the Wolves. And in the 2009 draft, new executive David Kahn blew his chance to get Love a co-star. This image will haunt the Wolves forever. Even after that mistake, Minnesota enjoyed enough lottery luck, interesting hires and big trade acquisitions to pull through, just as they had in 2004. They, however, didn't for many reasons.

So this remained the peak of the franchise. After more than a decade of failed promises, this version of the Minnesota Timberwolves looked like a goalie, but the Wolves mismanaged maintenance and, by dismantling their only contending roster, got the short end of the stick on every move, even the biggest one. . Here's how the post-Conference Finals berth era ends up looking a lot like the pre-Conference Finals era. This is how a big collapse happens.