Loyalty to K-Mac a vice for Taylor
Loyal to a fault can be a vice at times.
That’s the lesson to draw from Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor’s commitment to Kevin McHale as the GM of the team. Even now, as we near an NBA draft lottery that is the richest in talent of any pro hoops draft in a decade with a good chance the team could lose its first-round pick to a terrible trade we were on the wrong side of, there’s really only one man primarily responsible for the way the Wolves have been mismanaged into hopelessness. Most of the current Wolves roster couldn’t even sell the world’s best diet pills, let alone sell season tickets.
No, it’s not former Coach Dwane Casey or current Coach Randy Wittman. It’s McHale. McHale is the one who was largely responsible for the Joe Smith negotiation blunder that led to the Wolves losing five of their past seven first-round picks. Then, as soon as we got out from under that, McHale threw two more future picks away on trades that have only made the Wolves worse.
If the Wolves miss out on picking up some top-notch talent, the only real option left for the franchise is to trade Garnett to Chicago for Tyrus Thomas, a couple other players and at least one of their two first-round picks in this year’s draft, and start over from scratch.
Although radical, the Wolves would gain a much-needed commodity: hope. The team has some building blocks that would be more intriguing if it were in true rebuilding mode. Randy Foye, Rashad McCants and Craig Smith are solid and potentially great. Mark Blount is serviceable at center. Add in Tyrus Thomas, maybe Lual Deng and at least one first-round draft pick from the Bulls in exchange for Garnett and you’d have a nice, tidy talent base to build on, and some hope for the future. That’s lacking, lately, K-Mac.
But here’s the key: someone not named McHale needs to be running the team when a Chicago trade like this is made, or we’ll end up being the ones giving away first-round picks.
I’m not saying Kevin McHale’s a bad guy. But a bad GM? That’s another story.
