Lone Ranger

“I came very close to leaving that year,” McHale says now. “The team was in good shape and I really contemplated it. Then I thought, ‘Nah, maybe do a couple more things, see if we can get to the next level.’ ”

Flash forward to April 2007. Even with the selfless, charismatic Garnett continuing his string of great seasons, the Wolves had failed to qualify for the playoffs three years in a row. For the second straight season, Garnett—who had missed a mere thirteen games the previous ten years—had been sidelined with what seemed to be a specious injury at almost precisely the time the Wolves were eliminated from playoff competition. Two years earlier, McHale had made a disastrous trade with the Los Angeles Clippers, which compelled Minnesota to give the Clippers its precious pick in the upcoming NBA draft unless the Wolves finished among the worst teams in the league that year. The trade had put the franchise literally in a no-win position: It could lose a bunch of fairly meaningless games at the end of the year or lose the chance to draft a quality collegiate or international player who could improve the club in the near future. Wolves fans had reason to suspect the ball club was purposefully losing games.

Nor was the trade McHale’s only terrible decision. Ever since contract squabbles and bad chemistry had sabotaged that 2005 edition of the Wolves, he’d been frantically pulling levers like the Wizard of Oz, yet the team’s fortunes kept plummeting. Nearly all of the players from the glory days of 2004 were gone, replaced by less talented performers, many rewarded with expensive, long-term contracts. Another precious draft pick had been traded away to the Boston Celtics. Two coaches had been fired.

This was the demoralizing situation on April 19, when McHale loped into the Target Center media room for his year-end press conference. In classic fashion, he minced few words and bore the burden for a franchise in disarray: “It was a bad season. There is no other way you can say it. And it starts with me. I was responsible for putting that team on the floor and for the coaches that coached it. We had a bad year and I did a bad job. That’s the way it is. We have to make some changes.”