Lone Ranger

Since retirement in 1993, McHale has been named one of the fifty greatest players in NBA history and voted into the league’s Hall of Fame. His Celtics jersey has been retired to a place of honor in the rafters of the Fleet Center in Boston, just as his Gophers jersey adorns a wall in Williams Arena. In 1995, the U of M officially feted him as its basketball Player of the Century.

And yet, as gaudy as they are, the accolades, citations, and ceremonies don’t do full justice to McHale’s legacy. It was the way he played or, more accurately, the way he behaved as a player that is so memorably piquant. His Celtics teammates used to tease him about passing him the ball and never getting it back, but they knew, and McHale knew, that no defense could stop him. “Defense is all about taking away what somebody likes to do,” McHale told me two years ago, explaining why he worked so hard to develop some of the most extensive moves and sophisticated footwork the game has ever seen. “The more options that you can show people, the more you can dictate what you want to do.” The great Michael Jordan—himself a cutthroat competitor who liked to needle the opposition—once said that McHale talked more trash than any player he’d ever heard.

And so it was off the court as well. “Kevin was Eddie Haskell; always throwing spitballs when the coach’s back was turned,” Bob Ryan says. “The guy who doesn’t have the highest grades, but is the smartest kid in the class, with the best one-liners and the ability to rebel in ways that show he’s smarter than the teacher. I never encountered a player who told more stories that would have gotten anybody else in trouble, except he always had the perfect metaphor, the apt analogy.”

That trademark insouciance didn’t flag when McHale returned to Minnesota after retiring from the Celtics. (Even before his father was diagnosed with the cancer that would take his life in 1994, there was never any question that McHale would come back to his roots.) He signed on as color man for Timberwolves TV broadcasts and was an instant hit for his irreverent yet insightful lampooning of a franchise that had yet to win more than twenty-nine (of eighty-two) games a season in its first five years of existence. When then-new Wolves owner Glen Taylor convinced him to get involved in personnel matters, he made the bold, trendsetting decision to choose eighteen-year-old Kevin Garnett as the fifth overall pick in the 1995 NBA draft. And then there was the near-total and successful makeover of the team, which resulted in that 2004 season.