Glen Taylor Spent 31 Years Destroying Our Trust

Wednesday's Announcement Of The Wolves Sale Brings An End To His Tenure.

Let’s just get this out into the open: Minnesota is a basketball state.

The state floods universities with basketball talent on an annual basis. Not many, if any, remains within the borders of Minnesota for college athletics, but just take a look at the talent that has come out of the state in the last ten years alone. It’s an impressive list.

When the Gophers (mens or womens) and/or Timberwolves are competent, their respective arenas are bursting at the seams with fans eager to spend their well earned money on the product.

If you don’t believe me, just check social media last week when the Gophers hired new head coach Niko Medved, and fans continued to yearn for the days of old when Williams Arena was the hottest ticket in town.

You can also take a trip into your memories for when the Wolves made a run to the Western Conference Finals this past spring, or in 2004. Everyone, and I mean everyone, was buzzing about those teams. You couldn’t make t-shirts fast enough last spring after Ant yelled at TNT analyst Charles Barkley, “Bring ya ass,” when the team defeated Denver to go to the WCF.

This is what makes it a crime that the Timberwolves were on the doorstep of moving to New Orleans in 1994, just five years after the team was founded. The team’s founders, Marv Wolfenson and Harvey Ratner, had issues paying the lease at the still new Target Center and found a buyer for their club, an ownership group based in New Orleans who made it clear that is where the team would go when sold.

After the NBA blocked the sale, and a lot of posturing, former state senator Glen Taylor came forward and bought the team and kept them in Minnesota for good.

This was followed in the spring of 1995 by the Wolves drafting a high schooler from Chicago named Kevin Garnett.

The franchise now had an owner with good intentions and a franchise star player.

You would think the story would go happily on for the next 30 years, but that is not at all how the story goes. All the goodwill Glen Taylor had built up with the fans and state after saving the basketball team, would be undone over the course of the following three decades he owned the Timberwolves.

There was the Joe Smith scandal of 2000, where the Timberwolves (Taylor and then general manager Kevin McHale) were found of paying Smith money under the table while taking less than market value contracts with the team so they could have more cap space to build a winner. This was something done around the league, sure, but the Wolves were the ones caught.

The punishment was the loss of 1st round draft picks (and Taylor/McHale taking mandated leave of absences from the team) in the prime years of Kevin Garnett’s tenure here. Would picks have made the difference? Who knows. But they were lost and had to find less than reliable ways of putting competent players on the roster.

After the WCF run of 2004, the Wolves sank into mediocrity with Garnett still on the roster. The list of terrible roster moves is long and distinguished, and ultimately led to the trade of the franchise icon to Boston in the summer of 2007. Then after, Taylor made questionable remarks about Garnett’s commitment to the team in his final year in the Twin Cities. Remarks that, for Garnett was concerned, burned the bridge.

When Garnett returned to the Wolves in February 2015, thanks to convincing by basketball operations chief and head coach during Garnett’s first run, Flip Saunders, there was a promise of Garnett joining the front office after he called it a career. But as “The Big Ticket” has said time and again, the deal to move into the front office died when Saunders did in September of 2015.

The bridge, which maybe had a few wood chips left in the ashes from 2007, was set aflame again. Garnett accused Taylor of being “a snake” and his number 21 remains vacant from Target Center’s rafters because of the feud.

In between the Garnett eras, and even after the second go round, there were numerous hires by Taylor in the basketball department that caused the franchise to remain in the NBA’s basement for over a decade. David Kahn was the first hire post-McHale, and the draft history there remains a constant joke to NBA fans.

Saunders came in and righted the ship a bit before his passing in 2015, which caused Taylor to go out (and back on his word with Garnett) and hire Tom Thibodeau to run the basketball operations department and the bench as head coach. Another move that, for the most part, did not go well (see: Butler, Jimmy).

Gersson Rosas came in post Thibs to oversee basketball ops, hired by Taylor, and could not manage the department if his life depended on it. The final straw came in 2021 when an inappropriate workplace relationship came to light and Taylor finally decided to make a switch.

Around the same time Taylor told Rosas to pack his belongings, Taylor entered into an agreement with Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez for a minority share of the team. The deal eventually turned to the majority of the club in 2023, with a $1.5 billion price tag agreed upon.

But much like his tenue, Taylor opted for more chaos, as he decided to try and pull the plug on the deal in March 2024 just as the Wolves were about to embark on their most meaningful playoff run in 20 years. Weird how the franchise was valued much more than that $1.5 billion price the parties agreed on at that time. I’m sure that had nothing to do with Glen having second thoughts.

However, after all the legal proceedings, an arbitrator ruled this past February that the purchase of the team was still to go through as Lore and Rodriguez had all the assets (er, money) they said they did. Not a surprise, considering they had billionaire Michael Bloomberg part of their ownership group now.

With the sale finally expected to go through and pending a NBA board of governors approval, this era of the Timberwolves can finally be closed shut. Close it, lock it, and throw it in the attic to not be found for a while. You can thank whatever deity you believe in that this has finally ended. I sure will.

31 years spent tearing down our trust after saving the franchise.

That’s quite a line to write, but that’s the way we will remember the Glen Taylor owned Wolves.

Cover photo via NBA.com