FOR TIMBERWOLVES, IT’S NO ... MINNE-HA-HA : Future Seems Bright With Garnett, Marbury and Co., but a Small Market and Free Agency Could Threaten It All

There’s a new season in the air, but it’s not spring. It’s only April and there’s still snow in the air, driven by a delightful 40-mph breeze off the Great Plains, as a scalper paces the sidewalk near Target Center.

A scalper at a Minnesota Timberwolves’ game?

Maybe angry villagers with torches, but for eight sorry seasons since pro basketball returned to the tundra, there have been few scalpers. After the obligatory year of sellouts they promised Commissioner David Stern to get in, an innocent population had the entire NBA experience visited upon it and went back to ice fishing.

An owner’s son-in-law running the basketball operation . . . Christian Laettner pouting . . . Isaiah Rider rebelling . . . the piece de resistance, the owners, staggering under a cost overrun in the construction of their arena--the luxury model with the health club downstairs--using the 1994 All-Star weekend to blackmail the city into adding them to the welfare rolls and when spurned, selling to a New Orleans group. If the NBA hadn’t sued, Kevin Garnett might be living in the French Quarter now and there might be less speculation about his leaving.

Something has gone wonderfully right in three years, a Minny-miracle, symbolized by Garnett, the wunderkind of wunderkinder, not even 21 yet, already an all-star with two seasons in the league . . . and one before he will be a free agent.

It’s an exciting time, a precious one and a scary one. Beneath the joy, an unspoken questions lurks:

What if he leaves?

The new labor agreement is a cannon pointed at the small markets, freeing their coveted young players after three seasons, before they have established themselves or put down roots, to go to the bright lights of the big cities, if they--or their agents--wish.

Will all the Shaquille O’Neals and Alonzo Mournings leave the Orlandos and Charlottes for the Los Angeleses and Miamis? There already is speculation that Golden State’s Joe Smith and Denver’s Antonio McDyess, Garnett’s classmates in the 1995 draft, will bolt in ’98. Reports that Portland Coach P.J. Carlesimo will be fired might have sprung from management’s fear that it can’t re-sign Rasheed Wallace, another ‘95er, if Carlesimo yells at him.

But this is the mother lode. The only ‘95er from high school, Garnett is already the most advanced. Opposing coaches, such as the Pacers’ Larry Brown (“I love him”) are blown away by his size, skills and poise. He was the fifth pick, but if they held the draft today he would go No. 1 and then they would debate who would go second.

If Garnett, so mature, so beloved--he was just voted Minnesota’s most popular athlete, ahead of Kirby Puckett--his franchise’s centerpiece, takes a walk, which of the young payers will ever stay in any of the small markets?

To other small-market teams, the Timberwolves aren’t merely a team but a cause.

“Sure, you want to see it work,” says Washington Bullet Coach Bernie Bickerstaff, recently the general manager in Denver, where his franchise was devastated when he lost Dikembe Mutombo.

“A lot of times, all of us pull for the underdogs. Because you’ve been there.”

Says Indiana Pacer President Donnie Walsh: “With this new collective bargaining agreement, there should be a feeling among the big-market teams, ‘Hey, we can go in and get their best players.’ But if we allow that, then we’ll become a minor league.

“The biggest test to date will be that kid. If he can just be picked off, it doesn’t bode well.”

Garnett is about to jump into the range of $15 million a year. The Timberwolves simply hope he’ll grant them the privilege of paying it.

*

The wheel of history turns creakily. Last Sunday, the Timberwolves, intent on ending years of futility by clinching a playoff berth, were pasted, instead, by the Pacers, as General Manager Kevin McHale, the author of the turnaround, glowered and harangued the referees from the stands.

McHale was introduced to a writer after the game.

“How are you?” the writer asked.

“Terrible,” McHale said. “How are you?”

Scratch an old Celtic and there’s a competitor burning underneath, even McHale, the team cutup, who played class clown to Larry Bird’s valedictorian. Or as the Boston Globe’s Bob Ryan once put it, “Larry thought Kevin should get serious. Kevin thought Larry needed a life.”

Amazingly, even to McHale, he finds himself, not kicking back somewhere, but running a team, getting angry at referees, scouting, drafting, the whole schmear. If someone had told him that four years ago . . .

“I’d have told them they were crazy,” McHale says, wondering, as he must weekly, what he has gotten into. “I’m the one who’s crazy.

“I’ve got five kids and a wife, love to hunt and fish and play golf and do a lot of things that I don’t get a chance to do enough, then I do this. . . .

“You wish you could selectively get into it, but you can’t. When you do something, you’ve got to jump in with both feet. I probably would have been a lot more comfortable being a consultant, but new ownership came in. The new owner [Glen Taylor] was asking me about helping them and doing a bunch of stuff and one thing kind of led to another.

“The first time I answered the question, I said no, I wouldn’t run it, I don’t want to do it. Then, I kind of ran the draft for ‘em that year. Then just kind of got involved in it. It’s like most things that have happened in my life, I’m not sure exactly why.”

Actually, they wooed McHale back, bit by bit. First, he was the TV color commentator. Then assistant general manager, basically a consultant. Then he said he’d be the general manager while grooming his old University of Minnesota teammate, Flip Saunders, for the job.

Of course, while he was there, McHale was going to shape them up. He dumped Laettner, another competitor but a temperamental one and, like Garnett and Tom Gugliotta, a power forward. He dumped Rider and his string of distractions. He fired Coach Bill Blair 20 games into Garnett’s rookie year for not playing him enough. He gave up the closest thing to a center they had, Andrew Lang, in a draft-day deal to get Stephon Marbury. He found another center, 30-year-old rookie Dean Garrett, floating around.

Voila, a basketball team!

“Small, little mining town, if you come home from work on Friday and your car is sputtering and barely gets you to the driveway, you can’t expect to get up Monday morning and have it get you to work on time,” says McHale, a native of upstate Hibbing, a small, little mining town.

“Better do some work on it. Better fix it. This thing was broke. Nothing ever fixed itself in this world yet, and I’m the type of guy, I’m very impatient, I’m very competitive. I don’t like to lose, I’m teed off a lot and I wasn’t going to put up with it. So there’s one person left from when I took over, Doug West.”

They’re not a finished product--even with the improvement they can expect from Garnett and Marbury, they’re slender and they struggle against physical teams--but they’re on the rise.

Of course, everything depends on securing Garnett. Teams can make new offers after a player’s second season and McHale says signing Garnett is his top priority this summer.

However, they can’t even talk before July 1, so, officially, at least, McHale has no idea what the young man is thinking.

Maybe Garnett gives out a hint every once in a while?

“He might,” McHale says. “He might not.”

Look at the bright side. If the kid trots off to a big market, McHale can get back to hunting and fishing, knowing he tried.

*

“We went to watch [Garnett] work out in Chicago. They had all the people who were in the lottery. As we went there, I turned to Kevin McHale and said, ‘You know, we’re going to watch this kid and we’re going to come out of it and tell everybody we’re going to take the kid. We might scare somebody ahead of us to take him and maybe [Antonio] McDyess or one of those guys might slide to us.’

“And after we watched the kid work out, I turned to Kevin walking out and I said, ‘We better hope that kid is there at No. 5.’ ”

--Timberwolf Coach Flip Saunders

At the recent All-Star game, Wilt Chamberlain was delighted when “the young kid, Garrett,” introduced himself and asked questions about Wilt’s career. Garnett was the only current player who did, though. Chamberlain had a nice chat with Michael Jordan, who talked about it later in reverential tones, but Wilt says he had to go up to Jordan.

No, this isn’t your average 20-year-old.

Last season, McHale brought in Sam Mitchell, a veteran as humble as four years in the CBA and Europe can make one, to look out for Garnett. Mitchell quickly figured out the kid didn’t need any looking out for.

“I think people say that because I’m so much older than him but I never felt that way,” Mitchell says. “I felt we were teammates first and friends second. I never felt like Kevin needed a mentor.

“You could tell after the first day, he was a man. He was a 19-year-old who had seen a lot and been through a lot. Kevin was a mature adult. He knew how to make mature choices. You could just tell. He was different from most 19-year-olds.”

Of course, Garnett looks like your basic, cap-reversing, baggy-jeans-wearing 19-year-old. Off the floor, he carries on, breaking off a postgame interview to watch “SportsCenter,” slapping his head in wonder at the newest undergraduate declaring for the draft--”Victor Page! I can’t believe it!”--aiming a mock karate kick at the big-screen TV when the highlights of that night’s Timberwolves’ victory over the Bullets include a late traveling call against him.

He has the modern young player’s distaste for public relations. They do so many interviews, make so many commercials and get so much TV exposure, they are bored by the process. Approached for this story, he rails that the publicity department never tells him someone wants to talk to him.

Then he sits down, fixes his attention on the interviewer, speaks in complete sentences and answers questions responsively. A year ago, he was guarded. Now, everything’s cool.

“I’ve been in a lot of mature situations, where I really had to fend for myself, where I had to take care of my own, take care of my family,” he says. “So what’s so hard about getting a bundle of money and living, taking care of yourself?

“I mean, you also got to know the essentials of money and savings and value and everything. But what’s so hard about going from rags to riches?”

Well, if it happens too quickly, it can do what it did to Rider, his former teammate; to Ronnie Fields, a vaunted prep prospect he played with in high school, and many others, flip them right out.

At 20, Garnett makes $2 million a year and then there’s “the life.” Outside the dressing room, there’s a stack of empty shoe boxes. NBA players get a new pair every game with names like Nike Air Movin Uptempo (Terry Porter), Air Groovin Uptempo (Cherokee Parks) and Air Money (Doug West). Swimming in glory and money, many young players never progress beyond the rim-hanging-I-want-to-dunk-on-”SportsCenter” stage.

Garnett’s game, however, is all-around, no-frills, except for windmilling the occasional rebound. When Saunders tells him he did something wrong, he taps his head in acknowledgment. When he dunks, he runs back down court without doing a war dance. In the Bullet game, the clown on the court is Chris Webber, who stomps slowly back down on the floor after dunks, glaring theatrically left and right.

At 19, Garnett made the rookie All-Star game, at 20 the real All-Star game. He’s still sort of a cult figure, wowing coaches and general managers but known to the general public mostly as that kid from high school. That’s about to change.

“I can’t be pleased,” he says. “I know the mountaintop is a long way. . . . I know I have the mind-set and the willingness to work hard, to get there, but I’m still hungry. I feel like I’ve had crumbs on my plate and I’m trying to get a full-course meal right now.”

You have to like his chances.

OK, here’s the big question: staying or going?

“Right now, I’m in Minnesota,” Garnett says. “That’s all I’m concentrating on. I’m concentrating on the playoffs. I’m concentrating on having fun, kicking it with my boys, having fun with the team. That’s all I’m thinking about.

“I’m not thinking about Chicago in two years from now [where callers to talk shows think he’s going, their designated replacement for Michael Jordan]. Hey, I pay somebody to do that for me, know what I’m saying? That’s not my job.”

What if the money was the same in Minnesota as it was some other place?

“I’m not going to answer that,” Garnett says. “That has nothing to do with basketball. That’s the business side. I’m a hooper, know what I’m saying? I have insights on that, but right now I’m playing basketball and having fun.”

Weather forecast for professional basketball in Minnesota: Looks like a glorious spring, followed by a nervous summer.