Timberwolves’ Biggest Crime Was Getting Caught

Christian Laettner. Isaiah Rider. Stephon Marbury. David Falk. The doofus owners, Marv and Harv, who built a cost overrun named the Target Center and tried to bail themselves out of debt by selling the team to New Orleans.

And now, the worst scourge of all . . .

David Stern.

There isn’t much in the way of torture the NBA hadn’t already visited on the unsuspecting Minnesota Timberwolves but Stern just put the top hat on their snowman, taking the Timberwolves’ No. 1 picks until 2006, and promising further penalties for owner Glen Taylor and General Manager Kevin McHale, the men who turned a forlorn, frostbitten expansion franchise into a little jewel.

That’s all over, as is the NBA in the Twin Cities. Stern might as well have padlocked the arena.

McHale, who always wondered what he was doing there, just got his answer--providing target practice for overindulged players, ego-drunk agents and frustrated NBA officials--and may not stick around for more.

Of course, Stern notes, he had no choice. Like Claude Rains, playing the corrupt police chief in “Casablanca,” he was shocked--shocked!--to learn there was cheating going on.

There’s no dispute about the facts: The Timberwolves signed Joe Smith, a career disappointment now at the center of a storm worthy of a better player, to a secret long-term contract that violated salary-cap rules.

Thus, Stern has upheld a principle and everyone learned a valuable lesson:

From now on, when we’re finessing the rules, we have to make sure we never, ever, on any account, put anything on paper!

Right, like Phoenix Sun owner Jerry Colangelo and all the others who have been making these kinds of deals for years, didn’t already know that?

Not to single anyone out, because nods, winks and gentlemen’s agreements have been the lingua franca in the NBA since the cap was invented.

In a well-known and even more transparent case, free agent Danny Manning took a one-year deal with the capped-out Suns in 1994, with a gentlemen’s agreement that a long-term contract would follow.

Manning suffered a knee injury a few months later, but Colangelo honored his word, giving Manning a seven-year, $44-million deal, almost before he was off crutches.

In another famous case that had NBA bureaucrats grinding their teeth, Horace Grant rejected a long-term $20-million contract from the Chicago Bulls in 1995 for one year at $1 million from the Orlando Magic.

The league refused to approve a one-year deal so Grant signed a two-year contract for $2 million. Two seasons later, the Magic just happened to give him a five-year, $50-million deal.

Nods and winks aren’t even required, nor are tacit assurances going out of style.

The Lakers, for example, are making no secret of the $1.2-million exception they’re offering to Smith, now, by grace of Stern, a free agent.

Everyone knows Smith is worth more--and that if he comes here, the Lakers will pay it as soon as they can, in accordance with the cap rules.

Wherever Smith goes, there will be an understanding: We’ll sign you long-term, as soon as the rules allow. No one will have to say a word and no one will certainly put anything on paper.

In the end, Smith will probably take less to join a good team that’s out of cap room rather than the $6-million salary the lowly Bulls are offering. Competitive balance will not be served and the system will go on, as before.

For the Timberwolves, this was a tawdry little saga, indeed, starting when Eric Fleisher, your basic slime-ball, street-agent hiring, Falk-wannabe, started messing with them on behalf of his clients, Kevin Garnett and Marbury.

In 1997, Fleisher clearly intended to pull Garnett out of Minnesota and sign him in a bigger market, until Garnett, whose maturity for one so young and celebrated is remarkable, took control of the negotiations and re-signed with the Timberwolves.

By then, it was no longer safe to be in the same room with McHale and Fleisher.

In 1999, Fleisher lost Marbury to Falk, who helped Marbury flee to the New Jersey Nets. He may still be there, although no one has heard from him for years but Falk, whom he fired.

That same off-season, the Timberwolves got Smith, who was then leaving--and unwanted by--the Philadelphia 76ers, to sign for one year. Fleisher, who would now only deal directly with Taylor, also got the owner to assure him that if Smith stayed for three seasons, on one-year deals, a long-term contract would be forthcoming.

However, Taylor was about to undergo heart surgery. Just in case, Fleisher got him to actually execute the contracts. It was plainly illegal but, of course, there was no way the secret deals would ever see the light of day . . . except one.

Fleisher ultimately lost Garnett to his former partner, Andy Miller, and sued Miller. Court actions being the nasty, no-holds-barred fights that they are, what should bob to the surface but . . . Smith’s secret contracts!

Suddenly everyone was looking at the first known documentation of a practice the league had long heard about but could never prove before. As far as Stern was concerned, it was as if the Loch Ness monster did a guest spot on “The Tonight Show.”

Now, this isn’t a good time to be messing with Stern.

The ‘90s glow is over. Labor peace has been replaced by a union so hostile, it stymies any move Stern favors. His natural spokesmen, Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson, have been replaced by knuckleheads who just showed in Sydney, Australia, what they could do to the Dream Team concept.

Nor is this a good rule to get caught breaking.

The cap is the work of the NBA’s lawyers--Stern foremost among them--and embodies their conceit that they can devise an all-encompassing legal constriction, although anecdotal evidence suggests all teams will finesse the rules--in other words, cheat--without thinking twice .

The cap is still worth having. The evidence--small-market teams such as the Indiana Pacers and Utah Jazz competing deep into the playoffs--suggests it does work, even warped as it is. What you get with a better mousetrap is smarter mice.

Nevertheless, for years, the NBA’s legal beagles watched agents and general managers bend the rules until they looked like pretzels and thought, They’re playing us for chumps!

Then Smith’s under-the-table deal was put on the table.

Like that frustrated Maytag repairman who never gets a call, Stern leaped into action, imposing his harsh measures, even voiding Smith’s last two contracts--which had already expired--to take his Larry Bird rights away, even though an arbitrator had already ruled Smith must keep those rights. They allow a player to exceed the salary cap if he has been with the same team for three seasons.

“This was a fraud that went right to the heart of our compact,” Stern said last week. “ . . . The magnitude of this offense was shocking.”

Not that Stern is upset but by Thursday, the link to Smith’s bio on www.NBA.com had been removed from the player index and the Timberwolves’ roster. (If you want to see it, try: www.NBA.com/playerfile/joe_smith.html.)

Actually, the magnitude of this offense, itself, was ordinary. The shocking thing was that it was put on paper and, in the unlikeliest of scenarios, found out.

In order to maintain his outrage, Stern is playing dumb, pretending secret assurances aren’t common (“Not to my knowledge.”) Deputy Commissioner Russ Granik told writers on a conference call, “If you have evidence of that, please send it to me and we’ll prosecute accordingly.”

Nor was this any actual threat to competitive balance. This wasn’t the Lakers, Portland Trail Blazers or New York Knicks, using their glamour or wealth to tilt the field. This was the poor Timberwolves, trying to survive in a world stacked against them.

Whatever happened to making punishments fit crimes?

Stern could have taken a draft choice or two and upheld his principle. Instead, he went for the ax and offed the head of one of his young.

Yes, irony of ironies, this is the franchise Stern saved in 1994, intervening when the old owners, Marv Wolfenson and Harvey Ratner, wanted to sell the team to a New Orleans group, until a new Minnesota buyer could be found . . . Taylor.

“Stern giveth and Stern taketh away,” wrote the Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s Dan Barreiro.

” . . . Maybe the Wild [the NHL’s new expansion team] got it right on opening night. Maybe this is the state of hockey after all.”

Let’s hope so. The locals aren’t strong enough for much more of this professional basketball.

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Minnesota’s No. 1 Picks

Because of the ruling against the Timberwolves by NBA Commissioner David Stern for the illegal signing of Joe Smith, they will not have a first-round draft pick for the next five years. Past first-round draft picks for the Timberwolves:

* 2000--No pick

* 1999--Wally Szczerbiak, Miami (Ohio); William Avery, Duke

* 1998--Radoslav Nesterovic, Kinder Bologna (Italy)

* 1997--Paul Grant, Wisconsin

* 1996--Ray Allen, Connecticut (traded to Milwaukee)

* 1995--Kevin Garnett, Farragut Academy HS

* 1994--Donyell Marshall, Connecticut

* 1993--Isaiah Rider, Nevada Las Vegas

* 1992--Christian Laettner, Duke

* 1991--Luc Longley, New Mexico

* 1990--Felton Spencer, Louisville; Gerald Glass, Mississippi

* 1989--Pooh Richardson, UCLA