Lone Ranger

The assembled media mob wasn’t mollified. They’d heard McHale be “responsible” three years running and wondered why the “changes” never included replacing McHale himself, the architect of this team’s freefall from respectability. Calls for McHale to be fired began in earnest among both the fan base and the media about two years earlier (I wrote a column for City Pages calling him a lame duck eighteen months ago). Yet here he was—a night after a fan was forcibly removed from Target Center for wearing a bag over his head that said “Fire McHale!”—talking about what he was going to do to bring fans back to Target Center.

McHale was peppered with harsh, insinuating questions. Did Kevin Garnett still have confidence in his leadership? Why did he want to rehire coach Randy Wittman after he lost thirty out of forty-two games while the man McHale fired played .500 ball? Did McHale ever think he might not be the right man for the job? If previously fired coaches Flip Saunders and Dwane Casey were accountable for their bad records, why not him? And what about the fans who paid good money to come and chant for that dismissal last night, including the bag man who was ejected?

An answer typified why McHale has gone from demigod to antihero in less than four years. “I have never been concerned about whether people like me or don’t,” he declared. “I am going to do what I do and hopefully it works. But whether you like me or not is not going to cause me from losing one minute of sleep tonight.” With that, he took a pull from a water bottle, and the slightest trace of a smirk passed across his face.