The One Thing That Has Been Holding the Timberwolves Back (but also keeping them in MN?)

 

Pioneer Press

Billionaire Minnesota Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor, who also owns other entities like the Star Tribune, bought the Timberwolves in 1994 in a move that actually prevented them from being moved to New Orleans. In 2021, Taylor agreed to a deal with successful businessman and former Walmart CEO Marc Lore as well as with former baseball superstar Alex Rodriguez. During Taylor's tenure in Minnesota, he has been largely criticized and has had his fair share of blunders and questionable decisions. Throughout his time here, there has been a wide variety of different front office workers, coaches, and players, and they have been one of the worst professional sports franchises to exist in a big-time league when it comes to the actual performance they put out for fans. In the midst of all of this turmoil and turnover amongst the front office and team members, there has only been one consistent factor in it all: Glen Taylor. They say that a good business starts at the top, and that certainly seems true in this case. However, even though Taylor has made his fair share of mistakes and questionable decisions, he has done one thing that makes true Minnesota sports fans and me have a little more respect for him: he has been adamant on keeping the team in Minnesota. In fact, he even made it clear that in his sale of the team, part of the contract stated that the team must remain in Minnesota and that was always important to the negotiation process. Here, I will be looking to shed light on some of Taylor's biggest and most interesting blunders that have led to this team being known as a poverty franchise.

First, let's take a look at a somewhat random but important example in the form of the Joe Smith scandal. In 1995, Joe Smith was the number one overall draft choice of the Golden State Warriors after being a standout at Maryland. He ended up not living up to the hype, having career averages of 10.9 points per game and 6.4 rebounds per game. Nonetheless, he still had a respectable NBA career. He looked promising in his first few seasons in Oakland, but was traded to the Philadelphia 76ers after turning down an $80 million contract extension from the Warriors. He struggled with the '6ers and became a coveted free agent in 1998. He ended up curiously signing a one year, $1.75 million deal with the Timberwolves that immediately garnered attention around the league because of how much it was under his expected market value. This is because Smith and the Timberwolves came to an agreement where Smith would sign three one year deals for almost the vet's minimum so the team could acquire his Bird rights (Bird rights allow a team to go over their salary cap to sign a player). Before the beginning of the 2000 offseason (in which Smith signed his third one year deal with the Wolves), the NBA completed an investigation on the matter and severe punishments were enforced onto the team. Minnesota was fined $3.5 million and they had to forfeit their next FIVE consecutive first round picks (this was eventually toned down to only four firsts). Glen Taylor and then Vice President of Basketball Operations Kevin Mchale were also each forced to serve suspensions. Mchale actually denied any knowledge of the scandal, saying at the time "I haven't read a contract in four or five years...there are eight to ten NBA teams that do this all the time. They're just good at it. We're bad." Whether that is true or not is not necessarily important in this situation. The fact that Smith was projected to get a salary that gave him about $80 million in total but instead only took small, one year contracts is super suspicious to begin with, and it is utterly ridiculous that the Wolves thought they would get away with it and be able to pull a fast one on the NBA. Additionally, they took this risk on an average player. It would have been one thing if they were doing it for a player who would have a huge impact on the team. But no, let's make a super shady agreement for a guy who is going to be a role player for us. This is also just an embarrassment for an organization that is already ridiculed enough for chronically performing poorly. On top of that, this was right when Kevin Garnett was entering his prime years. If they would have possessed those four first round picks they got stripped from them they would have had an opportunity to do a much better job of building around their franchise player than they did.

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On the long list of mistakes Glen Taylor has made as the Timberwolves owner, souring his relationship with Kevin Garnett is up there with the worst of them. KG is far and away the greatest player to don a Timberwolves jersey; he is an NBA legend that has an MVP, a ring, a defensive player of the year award, and is well-known as one of the greatest power forwards to play the game. He is an icon in Minnesota and deeply beloved by the fanbase. His persistent energy, fiery competitiveness, and passion for not only the game but also for the state and its fans is what makes him loved by so many in Minnesota. On top of that, if it was not for him the team very realistically could be playing in a different state right now; their current group is finally starting to truly find success for the first time in the post Kevin Garnett era. To put it bluntly, Garnett despises Glen Taylor after years of turmoil and KG not being afraid to publicly bash him. According to Garnett, what put him over the edge was when Timberwolves legend Flip Saunders passed away back in 2015. Saunders is loved by not only Minnesota fans but especially by Garnett himself, as Saunders was a huge part of molding KG into the player he eventually became. KG has publicly stated that Glen Taylor made an informal agreement with him and Saunders that once KG retired, he would get a role in the team's front office, and eventually, Taylor would sell the team to a group revolving around Saunders and Garnett. However, KG has made it clear that when Flip died, apparently the deal died with him. Garnett also tried to put together a group to buy the team in 2021, but ultimately ended up pulling out of the running, criticizing Taylor for not changing his ways. However, interestingly enough, Taylor denies that KG ever even made an offer. Most fans like myself are going to err on the side of trusting Garnett instead of the owner who has gone against his word plenty of times. The feud has gotten so bad that Garnett refuses to even allow for his number to be retired by the team, which is really a shame considering how important he is to the franchise. Hopefully when Lore and A-Rod take over full time and Taylor is out of the picture, they will prioritize welcoming KG back with open arms and put number 21 in the rafters where it belongs. It really is a shame because Garnett has expressed how much he loves Minnesota time and time again, which is rare for a small market team like the Wolves. This is wishful thinking, but it would be really cool if they offered for KG to buy a share of the team. But we can't get our hopes up too much.

Lastly, it would not be right for me to end this post without talking about Taylor hiring Tom Thibodeau as not only the Timberwolves head coach but also as their president of basketball operations in 2016. Hiring him as the head coach is fine. It was not the hire I had wanted but it was very reasonable at the time. But hiring him as the president of basketball operations, a role that he had no experience in, was a huge mistake by Taylor that ended up being very costly for the franchise. As a coach, Thibodeau continued to partake in some of his peculiar ways, such as playing his best players for forty minutes every night and constantly barking at players on the court all game. But none of those things are nearly as bad as the decisions he made as the president of the team. He immediately moved on from fan-favorite Ricky Rubio in favor of a worse, more expensive point guard in Jeff Teague. He also weirdly was attempting to turn the team into the "Timberbulls" (as fans started calling them), because of the additions he made of former Bulls that played for him, including Taj Gibson, Derrick Rose, Jimmy Butler, and Luol Deng. Speaking of Butler, the Jimmy Butler trade in 2017 for Zach Lavine, Kris Dunn, and Lauri Markannen turned out to be a total disaster. The Wolves got one full year of Butler, and with him they were only good enough to be the eighth seed in the West and get smoked by the Rockets in the first round (granted, they were hovering around the fourth or fifth seed before Butler sustained a midseason injury). It should be noted that they actually had to play a game 83 against the Nuggets that year in order to even stamp their postseason bid. Anyway, after getting dominated by the Rockets in five games, Butler ended up demanding his way out of Minnesota in the most unprofessional way, even going out of his way to set up an interview with ESPN's Rachel Nichols just to bash the team on television. All in all, he ended up certainly not being the leader that Thibs was hoping for and the one that the young guys needed. Instead, he thought he was too good for the Timberwolves and was not pleased with the supposed nonchalant style of Karl-Anthony Towns and Andrew Wiggins. But at the end of the day, this falls on Glen Taylor hiring Thibs as the president of basketball operations. It could be argued that this trade was an understandable risk at the time, as the Timberwolves were a team desperate to even make the playoffs. However, it ended up flopping and Zach Lavine blossomed into a star in Chicago (as he was expected to). It left fans to only be able to wonder what the team would have looked like if the trio of Towns, Wiggins, and Lavine would have been able to develop alongside one another. Luckily enough, it may have actually ended up working out better for the Wolves considering that they were able to draft Anthony Edwards after being so bad in 2019. Ant certainly has a higher ceiling than those three and has the potential to take the Wolves to places they have never seen before.

To sum it up, Glen Taylor has made more than enough mistakes as the T-Wolves owner, especially including the Joe Smith contract scandal that cost them years of draft capital, the ongoing rift with franchise legend Kevin Garnett, and the failure that was hiring Tom Thibodeau as the team's president of basketball operations. Thankfully, the Wolves are in a really good place right now with the team having one of the best seasons in recent memory in the hands of young stars Karl-Anthony Towns and Anthony Edwards. It is fun that Timberwolves fans finally have something to look forward to!

Below, I clipped a Beef History video by SB Nation's Secret Base, which dives deeper into KG's beef with Glen Taylor and provides all of the important details as to how and why things unfolded this way: