Six months after they said hello to a new season by saying goodbye to Flip Saunders, the Timberwolves end their schedule aimed at a future seemingly sunnier than they might ever have imagined. Young center Karl-Anthony Towns is your next Rookie of the Year — just like forward Andrew Wiggins was the last one — and maybe even unanimously. Not only that, but Towns just might be on his way to redefining the very notion of a big man himself.
Just as veterans Kevin Garnett and Tayshaun Prince helped lead the Wolves to an 8-8 start, Towns, Wiggins and Zach LaVine brought them home down the season's stretch. Heading into Wednesday's finale at Target Center, the Wolves have that same 8-8 record in their past 16 games after they won at Golden State, Oklahoma City, Portland and Memphis this last month.
"What started as a difficult season with all the things that happened, these guys should be proud of themselves," said interim coach Sam Mitchell, whose own future is the team's big remaining question. "I don't think anyone saw us having the future that potentially we can have if guys stay healthy, stay humble and continue to work. I think we can have something pretty special here in Minnesota."
Dealing with their grief
On an occasion ripe with boundless hope, Wolves players circled in tight from their lockers 45 minutes before the opening night tip at Staples Center. Seated on the floor or on benches, they looked up and listened while NBA Commissioner Adam Silver spoke quietly about grief and death, about sorrow and cherished memories.
Saunders, the Wolves coach and president of basketball operations, died on a Sunday morning, the solemn news ending team practice early and sending everyone home to cope, each in his own way. Calling from his own experiences three nights later, Silver urged players — so many of them so young — not to run from their feelings, but rather rely upon each other and talk openly about their loss.
Silver locked eyes with Garnett — the grown man whom Saunders nurtured from gangly teenager into future Hall of Famer — as Silver spoke about his long friendship with the coach everyone knew as Flip. He reminded players they were part of a bigger family, the NBA family.
Scheduled to attend the Lakers-Wolves opener anyway, Silver felt it important he address players and coaches reeling from Saunders' death but still with work to do and a season to start.
"You could see it in their eyes," Silver says now, six months later.
Three hours later, the Wolves trailed by nine with 2:13 left and won by a point in a nationally televised game when the Lakers missed a short shot at the horn. Garnett and point guard Ricky Rubio each pointed to the heavens as they left the court. "We had a little help today," Rubio said then.
Two nights after that, the Wolves won at Denver, starting the season on the road 2-0 for the first time ever. Towns considered that less important as the team flew home for a memorial service that next day that drew a Who's Who of coaches: Doc Rivers, Gregg Popovich, George Karl, Tom Thibodeau, Jeff Van Gundy, Tom Izzo as well as many others.
"We can go tomorrow as winners to bury our coach," Towns said. "That was more important to me."
Glimpses of what might be
Offering variations on a theme that continued until season's end, the Wolves lost their first six home games — including an emotional home opener when fans ceremonially said goodbye to their beloved coach — and won their first four on the road.
Five months later, the Wolves inexplicably have won two more games on the road than at Target Center. Call it the road-court advantage, apparently.
With graybeards Garnett and Prince starting games because Mitchell trusted their defensive stability, the Wolves' 8-8 season start that kept them even until Thanksgiving was a reminder of what has been.
It was the Wolves' fourth consecutive road victory during that start that showed what could be, with each of their two No. 1 overall draft picks featured at opposite ends.
In the second week of the season, the Wolves led by 34 points early in the second half at Atlanta but trailed by one point late. Wiggins scored seven consecutive points during a closing 11-0 run. He followed a 30-point game in Chicago two nights earlier with another by scoring 33 that night. Meanwhile, Towns' three blocked shots all came within 37 seconds when it mattered most.
"A superstar wanting to end the game on his terms, that's what I saw," Towns said, gesturing toward Wiggins' open locker stall afterward.
Old warriors bid farewell
Well after they turned the Wolves' 122-121 overtime victory loose to youngsters, Garnett and Lakers superstar Kobe Bryant walked off the Target Center's court as opponents for the 76th and final time.
They arrived in consecutive years two decades ago, unproven teenagers brash enough to enter the NBA directly out of high school. They leave, at least in Bryant's case at the end of the current season, as elder statesmen, champions and certain Basketball Hall of Famers.
"It was great for both of us," Bryant said that night. "It seemed like yesterday we were the young ones. It's just crazy to me, lining up against KG all these years. It's just nuts. Where did time go?"
Bryant's Lakers beat Garnett's Wolves in the 2004 West finals. Starting in 2008, they met twice in three years in the NBA Finals, with Garnett's Boston team winning in 2008, the Lakers in 2010.
Bryant will retire after Wednesday's finale. Garnett is signed for next year whether as mentor and/or power forward, but he hasn't finished the past two seasons because of aging knees. His former coach Rivers recently said Garnett "probably" is strongly contemplating retirement, but he has 8 million guaranteed reasons to return.
He has been in a retrospective mood recently on social media. Garnett's time is approaching sooner or later and he knows it. He intends to pursue team ownership when he retires.
"The impact which you put on the league, leaving your stamp on the game, I'm watching Kob, I'm watching everybody who's considered 'elders' leave their mark on the game," Garnett said in December. "… To come into this league, to have aspirations to want to be something, to leave your mark in this league says a lot, not just about your work ethic but your talent and what you've been able to become."
Lessons found in run of losses
November and its promising start gave way to January and a 2-14 record that included the final eight games of a nine-game losing streak, a loss at lousy Philadelphia and a 26-point home loss to Cleveland.
All the while, Mitchell pushed players with an old-school approach that the interim coach occasionally called "coaching hard."
LaVine experienced it, particularly after Mitchell experimented with him at shooting guard, abandoned the idea and then went back to developing the then-20-year-old at point guard for a time. LaVine said being coached hard showed his coaches cared about him, then joked, "As much as they're on me, they must love me to death."
Forward/center Gorgui Dieng experienced it, too, perhaps most of all. But he had played for demanding, combustible Rick Pitino at Louisville.
"You know, Sam's that type of coach," Dieng said. "To be honest, it was tough for me when we started the season, but I just embrace it and understand it will not last forever. I just pay attention to what he says and what he wants me to do and not listen to the way he says it. I think I've improved as a basketball player and as a man as well. Maybe two or three years ago, I wouldn't respond like this. I think I respond in the right way."
Wanted: more storage space
At this rate, Towns' parents are going to need a bigger house.
His first pro season brought a conference rookie of the month award every month from November to March, a feat achieved previously only by such players as Damian Lillard, Chris Paul, Carmelo Anthony, LeBron James, Tim Duncan and David Robinson. It brought him a Western player of the week award in April, making him the eighth player in Wolves history to do so.
But none of those trophies, not even the one he won for a big man's victory over guards in the skills challenge at February's All-Star weekend, go home with him.
Towns claims the only ones he keeps near and dear to him are team awards earned by winning, such as the three state championship rings he keeps from his New Jersey high school teams. He did keep a ring from his season at Kentucky that commemorates its Final Four trip and 38-0 season start as a reminder not to let opportunities go unclaimed.
"I think I held it in my hands for 30 minutes, but after that it was gone," Towns said about his skills challenge trophy. "They're all great honors, but if it's not a championship, it's something I don't need. I only keep rings in my house. They stay with me forever. But my parents like 'em."
That's why he took the trophy — a victory for all big men everywhere in which "I was able to make critics wrong, Vegas wrong, Ricky Rubio wrong" — home to papa.
His father, Karl Sr., accepted the trophy as if it were his own.
"He had dinner with the trophy," Towns said. "He went to a dining table we never eat at, put it on top of the table, sat down with the trophy and ate with it. It was like it was his date. He was so proud of it."
So what happens when Towns wins the big trophy, the one for Rookie of the Year, perhaps unanimously? Does it go home with him or is it dad's dinner date?
"No," he said, "that goes straight to the parents' house."
A point guard with a goal
When the point guard who purportedly can't shoot made the buzzer-beating three that gave the Wolves a victory at Oklahoma City for the first time since 2008, Towns walked out of the shower in a joyously noisy locker room shouting, "Rubio for President!"
Given Rubio's $55 million contract that started this season and the fact it's an election year, it's a wonder nobody responded back, "Four more years! Four more years!"
Rubio signed that big contract in October 2014, primarily because it ensured his financial future. Feeling healthier than he has since maybe his rookie season, Rubio now sounds like a man who finally, truly can see a future through all the losses these past five seasons, even given trade discussions involving his name before February's deadline.
"At the time it was good," he said about when he signed, "and now I see the light, too. I'm happy here."
A winner at the highest levels in Europe, Rubio seems less frustrated and more patient in a season when his team once again has lost more than 50 games.
"It's different," he said recently. "I was coming from a mentality that every game matters and I still have the same mentality, but you have to learn. The first couple years were really tough on me. Losing every game was like the worst thing in the world. It's still a bad, bad feeling — but you have to understand this team is a process. We have a lot of young guys who need to learn and there's no formula to skip that process. Still, I hate that losing. I still don't understand some nights, but it's part of the process.
"At the end of the day, they're going to remember you if you win championships or not. That's what we're trying to build here. That's why I was happy to leave Europe because I won everything over there so I could leave as a winner and I don't want to leave the NBA without a championship."
Road victories offer optimism
Five games from the end, the Wolves delivered the season's signature victory, a 124-117 overtime decision at defending NBA champion Golden State that opened a three-game West Coast trip on which they went undefeated.
By the time they returned home from a trip capped by Towns' last-second winning hook shot at Portland, the Wolves were 8-7 in their previous 15 games.
Before Rubio's buzzer-beater beat the Thunder, the Wolves had gone 2-27 in Oklahoma City, Memphis, Golden State and Portland the previous four years.
Now the question is: Will the Wolves' improvement and late-season surge persuade owner Glen Taylor to shorten interim head coach Sam Mitchell's title?
"I wish we were clicking like this at the beginning of the year," Wiggins said after delivering the Warriors only their second regular-season home loss in 57 games. "How we're playing now, if we were playing like this, the whole year would be a different story. Next year, good start."
Sitting in the audience that night was Izzo. Only weeks after 15th-seed Middle Tennessee State upset Izzo's heavily favored Michigan State team in the NCAA tournament, he traveled to watch former players Draymond Green and Adreian Payne. But before the game, he remembered fondly a longtime friend.
"I miss Flip, I miss Flip a lot," he said. "He used to watch that QVC network and order watches at 2 or 3 in the morning. I had a great appreciation for that. I do miss him. I miss everything he was about. Maybe that's why we lost. Playoff time, he always used to send me a couple NBA sideline out-of-bounds plays. He also used to talk about putting in a few new wrinkles. Maybe I didn't do a good enough job adding a few things."
Izzo tilted his head skyward. "So, Flip, next time help me out a little bit."
