The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

If new Timberwolves President of Basketball Operations David Kahn had decided to keep Kevin McHale on as coach of the ballclub, I would have thought owner Glen Taylor had made it a precondition of Kahn's hiring. In other words, no one should be surprised by today's announcement that the Wolves were terminating McHale's 16-year tenure with the franchise--a move that, depending on your logic, was either years or months overdue. 

Let's look at the lopsided balance sheet on the pros and cons of McHale continuing to coach the Wolves. The biggest plus is pretty fundamental: McHale is a very capable coach, second only to Flip Saunders in franchise history, in my estimation. He is the uber-"player's coach" in that he'll always view the game with not only a player's eyes, but a player's heart and soul. He has a profound empathy for the ecstasies and agonies pervading a player's existence, and, for better and for worse, he stubbornly refuses to downgrade that perspective as his first point of reference.  This makes him a sage teacher and a motivator of inventive durability, whose cheerleading has a greater chance of becoming self-fulfilling prophecy than most coaches under similar circumstances.  But it also makes him an equivocal taskmaster and rationalizer for his troops, as anyone who wondered why he couldn't get Al Jefferson to hustle back more often on D or Mike Miller to proactively look for his own shot discovered. McHale also has a strong, albeit under-utilized, grasp and appreciation for the big-picture ebb and flow of the game. His postgame press conferences often succinctly identify the key elements that swung the game either way. If he's less enamored with X's and O's, well, that's what assistants with chalkboards are for.

That said, McHale's first stint coaching the team was more impressive than his second, although both were sufficient to establish his ability. He took over a moribund yet bickering sub-.500 team from Flip Saunders, a squad widely expected to vie for a ring after a conference finals appearance the year before, and through a combination of steady mentorship (Michael Olowokandi probably never played better, and yes, that's faint praise) and tough love (complainer Sam Cassell came off the bench rather than start for much of McHale's stint) guided it to a 19-12 record that nearly made the playoffs. By contrast, last year's performance was easy pickin's. The ballclub has just endured Randy Wittman's too-accurate Bobby Knight imitation, and felt beat-down and ridiculed rather than spurred on by fear and/or respect, which Wittman didn't have the gravitas on his resume to provide as either a player or a coach. After his first game back on the sidelines, he fawned over the effort exhibited by his players and pledged to get better as a coach so he would be worthy of it. His over-the-top praise for both Al Jefferson and Kevin Love during their respective first years with the team was in sharp contrast to his increasingly passive-aggressive stance toward the flaws in Kevin Garnett's game during KG's final years here. No wonder Love and Jefferson would run through a wall for him. Ditto Randy Foye, who McHale freed from the constant badgering Wittman provided on his obvious, and probably unimprovable, lack of natural point guard skills. 

Yes, a more confident Wolves team won 10 of its first 12 games in January less than three weeks after McHale took over for Wittman, earning his NBA Coach of the Month honors. Many rose-colored Wolves fans would cling to that period as the potential new status quo had Al Jefferson not gotten hurt in the final minute of the game in New Orleans on Feburary 8.  But let's be realistic here, and recall some crucial facts from that stirring upward blip in January. The caliber of the opposition generally ranged from wretched to mediocre, further diluted by the Wolves' freakish run of good fortune that had five or six of their opponents losing at least one or two of their top three players going into the games. You may also recall that at the time Jefferson wrecked his knee in February, that January splurge was becoming a distant memory, and performance outlier--the team was enduring its 6th loss in 7 games that night, and the average margin of those losses was more than 9 points. Also, the largest reason for the January bounce was the best stretch of basketball in Randy Foye's career, a three-week period of excellence that he hasn't come close to duplicating before or since, Al or no Al.

The point is, a Timberwolves team at full strength--Corey Brewer as well as Jefferson ready for action all 82 games--with McHale on the sideline was still not going to play .500 basketball. That's because coach Kevin McHale still had to manage a roster assembled by GM Kevin McHale, who is an inferior talent.

Which brings us back to the no-brainer decision made by David Kahn today. If we stipulate on the "pro" side of the ledger that McHale is a good coach who enjoys the steadfast support and loyalty of his players and is a high-profile Hall of Famer on a franchise with a miniscule Q rating, consider the mountain of baggage in the "con" column. The toxic mixture of antipathy and apathy toward the Wolves organization is at an all-time high. Two or three years ago, *before* the Wolves limped through 22-60 and 24-58 seasons, the default position for the casual sports fan chatting hoops at a party was to disparage McHale with some epithet like "McFail," bemoan the team's inability to win despite the decade-long presence of Garnett, and conclude with a "who cares anyway?" shrug. Seriously, that was probably the least controversial way to parrot conventional wisdom and walk away clean.

Since that time, McHale has done enough credible scut work--stockpiling draft choices while creating cap space by dumping the bloated salaries of Davis, Blount, Jaric, Hassell and Antoine Walker--to polarize the die-hard fan base between those who think he had rebouned into competency and deserved to see part of it through as coach, and those who remembered Roy for Foye, McCants instead of Grainger, and the acquisition of Davis, Blount, Jaric, and Hassell and wanted him gone long ago. But the casual fans are even more entrenched in interrupting their overall indifference only if a gratuitous swipe can be made at the Wolves' mismanagement. It's no secret, folks, that Glen Taylor can't give away Timberwolves tickets. So, along comes David Kahn, the fresh face and new leader, knowing that a clean slate and the promise of change are the only chips he can play for awhile, and somebody actually thinks his first major decision is to going to be retaining the person who unquestionably is most responsible for the current makeup of the Wolves' sorry state of affairs? Really?

The toxic public relations is reason enough to cut McHale loose, but that aspect is actually dwarfed in significance by the philosophical, hierarchical, and temperamental train wreck in the internal affairs of the Wolves braintrust that could have easily occurred if McHale had stuck around. As I've said many times before, what daft, self-destructive gene would compel a new personnel guru like Kahn to put the person who held his job for nearly 14 years on the sidelines in charge of molding and fulfilling his fresh blueprint for restoring the team to respectability?

In case folks hadn't noticed, Kevin McHale is hardly a shrinking violet. Even after his longtime buddy and college teammate took over the coaching reins and guided the club to eight straight playoff appearances, the friction between the two men over how to manage the players both on the court and in the locker room steadily escalated, to the point where less than a year after Flip Saunders had his squad in the conference finals, McHale was bouncing him out the door and replacing him on the sidelines, resulting in bad blood and ill will that lingers to this day. Then, there was Saunders' successor, Dwane Casey. Halfway through his second year, Casey had a team almost everyone had tabbed as one of league's bottom feeders instead ensconced as the 8th seed in the rugged Western Conference, sitting pretty at 20-20. McHale fired him because he felt the ballclub "lacked consistency" under Casey, and continued to mistakenly believe that "a few tweaks" were all that was necessary to restore the club to contender status. (That was January 2007. I entitled my column on Casey's firing "McHale's Last Gasp;" this, after referring to McHale as a "lame duck" back in 2006.)

What this history demonstrates is that McHale had very strong and definite ideas about how to run the ballclub, and when those expectations weren't met, he opted for scapegoating over patience and compromise. Now, imagine what happens if McHale is back as coach. Consider that as much as "McFail" is derided and disrespected among the casual sporting public at-large, exercising command and being accorded fealty are second-nature to McHale inside the bowels of Target Center, where his tenure with the Wolves predates everyone of consequence--the entire current roster and front office, of course, and on through the departed Garnett (drafted by McHale, traded by McHale) to owner Glen Taylor himself.  McHale accepted the personnel job as a personal favor to Taylor, who needed his star power and basketball smarts, and did in fact transform a franchise that hadn't won more than 29 games in a season before he arrived into a perennial playoff team. And many believe (it certainly has been long whispered, anyway) that McHale fell on his sword over the illegal Joe Smith signing, and accepted a year's suspension without a squawk. More recently, nearly every player on the roster knows McHale actively sought their services--the best, or at least most credible, endorsement of all--and publicly defended their performance through good times and bad. They know that McHale has openly linked his fate to theirs.

Consider that the two most dominant aspects of McHale's hoops persona are a take-no-prisoners competitive fire (ask Kurt Rambis about that; or the doctor who correctly informed McHale that he might have trouble walking for the rest of his life if he continued to play in the 1987 playoffs on a broken bone and torn ligaments in his right foot) and a blatantly honest yet mischievous anti-authoritarian streak that brooks no bullshit and isn't afraid to playfully bedevil anyone, even if the perceived bullshitter was a legend like Red Auerbach or a disciplinarian like coach Bill Fitch.

Okay, take all that information and imagine what happens when Kahn and McHale start to work together. It doesn't take long to notice that Kahn is a verbally slick and Machiavellian lawyer, who can speak the language of agents and owners, and, despite never playing the game at a high level himself, has put in the long hours of study and planning and generated enough front office experience to have some very definite ideas about how to operate a franchise so that it is successful on the court and on the bottom line.  Kahn has already stated that a five-stage rebuilding of the ballclub will occur over the next 16-months, creating the expectation of dramatic change in the personnel and identity of the club over that period via the draft, free agency and trades. He has stated that, to be a championship contender, he imagines that Al Jefferson will be the team's second best player and Kevin Love may be its 4th best player. He frequently states that "everything is on the table" when considering how best to turn around the fortunes of the Wolves.

Even if McHale was genuinely willing to be the loyal lieutenant moving forward (a longshot at best, although McHale's willingness to risk the indignity of offering himself and being turned down is already a surprise), one would have to be pretty stupid to believe that synergy was a more likely outcome than dissension in the working relationship between the two men. And David Kahn is not stupid.

Indeed, Kahn shrewdly killed McHale with kindness at today's press conference. Exclaiming that it was "an especially sad day" and that his decision was "no fun," Kahn spoke of McHale as a "very special person" who is "warm" and "bright" and "has a big heart" and "cares about his players" and is "a great man" who "did some great things, some really remarkable things" for the franchise. Oh, and going in, Kahn knew of McHale's greatness, but during this process he's discovered that McHale is "a better person than I thought."

Any specifics as to why he decided not to retain McHale would be disrespectful to McHale, and he wasn't going to do that, Kahn purred, and if that bit of PR ju jitsu didn't tell you all you needed to know about why the plainspoken Iron Ranger wasn't on the premises, well, you probably overlooked the 349 good reasons that came before. Kahn did acknowledge that the more he thought about how things would unfold moving forward, "it appeared to me that there would be challenges that would difficult to surmount." Amen to that.

I've referred to Kahn as slick and Machiavellian and of the same ilk as agents and owners thus far, hardly descriptions of endearment. Stylistically, the guy is the sort of smooth operator I intuitively distrust--even his informal jibes and bon mots feel expertly calibrated. But on the nuts-and-bolts substance of his comments and strategies for the Wolves organization thus far, Kahn has been logical, insightful, well-backgrounded, and forthright. He deserves the honeymoon of an open mind from the fans, the media, and especially the players, who are likely plenty piqued at McHale's removal. I'll close with some bullet points on some of the more salient responses during today's press conference, and mention to folks reading this early enough Thursday morning that I'll be on MPR talking about McHale's removal sometime around 8 or 9 a.m.

* In response to my question about where on the continuum he would fall with respect to player disappointment over McHale's departure: Toward empathy for their feelings or in reminding them that the league is a business with consequences and neither they nor McHale should be immune, Kahn said that of course he empathized with the players and has assured them that he wants the next coach to be a positive presence who works in elevating the attitude and enthusiasm of what he anticipates will be a young team for some time to come.

*  As to who that next coach would be, Kahn said flatly, "I have no candidate--none. Nothing on the back of a napkin."

* He reminded folks that big changes are probably afoot, pointing out that "we won 24 games last year" and that while even though Jefferson was hurt, the team "has a lot of work to do." He also reminded people that "we won't do it all right away," that the changes would take time. He added that the manuvers he and the front office execute need to be thoroughly grounded in a coherent philosophy, with an eye "toward a 7 to 10 year period." Not that all the moves will be that long-term or unyielding in one direction, but that "the decisions we make need to have some lasting value."

* When a member of the media remarked that McHale had been quoted as saying that Kahn had told him last week that he was moving in a different direction and that McHale had responded that Kahn was making a mistake, Kahn replied that no such conversation took place last week. A smooth sidestep. 

* Kahn defended Kevin Love for essentially breaking the story of McHale's departure via a tweet on his Twitter account. "I don't want Kevin to feel bad about that. I don't think it is a big deal," he said. Refreshing.

* Last but not least, the most striking thing Kahn said in his sort-of background-only chat with the media over breakfast last week was that it is best when your best player generates the majority of the plays through ball possession, a la Lebron, Kobe, Wade, etc, as opposed to a Shaq or a Dwight Howard (or an Al Jefferson). He wants a dominant low post force, especially for defense, to work in tandem with Jefferson and Love, but plainly believes a larger and perhaps more realistic priority is to find good shooters and playmakers out on the perimeter and (he didn't say this, but the implication was there) hope that one evolves into a star. He acknowledged and agreed with a consensus that Blake Griffin is the best player in the draft and that Rubio and Thabeet are in the mix at 2-3, but indicated the distance between the second pick and the sixth pick, the Wolves' current slot, might not mean much is terms of the caliber of player chosen.