Matchup Groan

One thing is for sure, this won’t be any day at the beach.

Wednesday night when the Timberwolves clinched home court in a playoff series for the first time, the heavens here wept, as if moved. With the temperature in the 30s, it sprinkled down as snow, which can happen in mid-April this far n-n-n-north.

For the Lakers, used to staying home in the first round and recently required to do little more than give the Portland Trail Blazers’ house of cards a tap, heading off toward the Arctic Circle to take on a 51-game winner represents a new, exciting and who-needed-it challenge.

Nor is this good news for the Timberwolves. For all the respect they’re accorded nationally, they’re pilloried locally for failing to get out of the first round in six tries, although they were never favored and never had the home court.

Now they’ve just pulled themselves up to No. 4 in the West, which, after all they’ve been put through by Isaiah Rider, Christian Laettner, Stephon Marbury and, worst of all, David Stern, ranks as a major accomplishment, and look what they get ... the booby prize of booby prizes.

“Any time you’re playing a three-time defending champion, no one wants to be in that situation,” Coach Flip Saunders said last week, in a rare concession to reality. “I mean, they’re the team you have to beat....

“We came back on the plane [from Memphis, where they had just won their final game, before the Lakers won and the Trail Blazers lost]. The nonplayers, when we heard we were playing the Lakers, everyone just kind of groaned a little bit.

“The players actually showed little emotion. To them, it was pretty much matter of fact.”

Actually, a team official on the flight said the players were mostly asleep. They nodded off, dreaming of opening against the Trail Blazers and awoke to learn the Lakers were coming.

“I was watching the Lakers play Golden State and Portland play the Clippers,” said General Manager Kevin McHale, who had stayed home. “I shut off the TV and said, ‘We’re playing the Lakers.’ ”

“You shot the TV?” asked a local writer.

“No, shut off the TV,” said McHale.

If another early departure was again in their future, the Timberwolves were trying not to give anything away before the fact. The operative phrases were, “You’ve just got to go out and play,” “Kevin Garnett is the only one who’s been here seven years, so what do the rest of these guys know about it?” and that old favorite, “That’s ancient history.”

Saunders did say he had a feeling they would run into the Lakers, perhaps just from a coach’s normal fear of the worst-case scenario.

So one of the local TV guys asked Wally Szczerbiak if he’d had any premonitions about the Lakers.

“That’s a stupid question,” Szczerbiak said.

Not that this gutty little team, which rose from the ashes of the bumbling expansion franchise that hatched it, deserves so much bad luck, but in some latitudes, it goes that way.

On the bright side, if that which doesn’t kill them really makes them stronger, they should rule this league one day.

Of course, then there’s the meantime.

Small Markets Got

No Reason to Live

It’s not as if they didn’t make any mistakes. For their first six seasons, that was all they did.

The original owners, Marv Wolfenson and Harvey Ratner, turned down civic financing to build their own arena, demanded a bailout after a massive cost overrun and within five seasons were negotiating to sell the franchise to a New Orleans group ... as the NBA clans arrived for the 1994 All-Star game, awarded to the city to celebrate its return to professional basketball.

An incensed Commissioner David Stern blocked the sale and found a local buyer, billionaire printing magnate Glen Taylor, but the honeymoon was over.

This is hockey more than basketball country, where even the loss of the North Stars in 1993 and a seven-year NHL void couldn’t turn off the fan base, which has embraced the new Wild. The state high school hockey tournament is famous. The University of Minnesota Gophers’ recent triumph in the NCAA hockey tournament resulted in a riot so big, the police are still going through TV stations’ videotapes, trying to identify the people who set the fires.

If the Timberwolves had a finite amount of good will available, they were in trouble.

Their teams were bad. Their draft picks were standard, what-anyone-would-have-done selections, but they rarely worked out.

In 1992, when the Timberwolves had the worst record by six games, Orlando drew Shaquille O’Neal, Charlotte drew Alonzo Mourning and they were left with Laettner.

In 1993, they got Rider at No. 5. In 1994, they got Donyell Marshall.

That summer, McHale, the old Celtic star and a Minnesota native, took over and things turned up. A sharp guy, if blunt-spoken to a fault, he fearlessly unloaded the disappointments (Laettner, Marshall) and the embarrassments (Rider), charting a new course for the franchise with his first draft choice: Garnett, the high school phenom, the No. 5 pick in 1995.

In 1996, they got Marbury, a Georgia Tech freshman, supposedly Garnett’s close friend, in a draft-day deal, Marbury having let the Bucks know he didn’t want to be in Milwaukee.

Reports of the friendship turned out to have been exaggerated but Marbury’s talent was real. In their first season, the 22-year-old Marbury and the 20-year-old Garnett made the playoffs as a sixth-seeded team, although they were swept by the third-seeded Rockets.

Then the bizarre stuff began.

The NBA was just entering its halcyon period. Everyone made money, teams had salary cap room, free agents moved freely and the rookie cap tied up players for only three seasons, giving the young guys immense power quickly.

For the Timberwolves, in a small, cold-weather market with two of the brightest young stars, it would be a particularly trying period and remain so, to this day.

1997-98: Garnett signs a $120-million extension, biggest in sports history, after bitter negotiations in which his agent, Eric Fleisher, looks like he’s trying to take him out of there but team officials suggest Garnett stepped in and told Fleisher to keep him in town.

Garnett says, “It ain’t about the money,” which is true -- he could have gotten it elsewhere -- but doesn’t go over well.

Returning to the playoffs and seeded No. 7, they take the No. 2 SuperSonics to a fifth game in Seattle but lose.

Nevertheless, everyone thinks they’re on their way. What could go wrong now?

1998-99: The lockout wipes out the first three months and when it ends, the agents wipe out the Timberwolves.

Tom Gugliotta tries to force a trade to the Lakers. McHale won’t take Elden Campbell, Sean Rooks and their contracts, along with Eddie Jones. Gugliotta goes to Phoenix for less than what Minnesota offered, leaving McHale with nothing.

Marbury dumps Fleisher, the agent he shared with Garnett, and hires David Falk, who flies in to inform the Timberwolves they’d better move Marbury, an upcoming free agent, while they can.

McHale says if there’s ever a nuclear holocaust, all that will remain will be the cockroaches and the agents but, accepting the inevitable, trades Marbury to the Nets in a three-way deal for Terrell Brandon.

Marbury later admits he just couldn’t handle staying for $80 million, all that he can get under the new bargaining contract, with Garnett making so much more.

The Timberwolves still go 25-25, making the playoffs but, seeded No. 8, are eliminated, 3-1, by the title-bound Spurs.

1999-2000: Their first 50-win season is good enough only for a No. 6 seeding and a first-round matchup with the 59-win Trail Blazers, who eliminate them, 3-1.

After that, their world collapses around them all over again.

Starting guard Malik Sealy dies in a car crash. Fleisher sues his old assistant, Andy Miller, who has gone on his own, taking Garnett. Among the documents produced is an illegal contract Fleisher negotiated with Taylor on behalf of Joe Smith, which was supposed to be kept secret. Stern rocks the Timberwolves with a virtual death penalty, fining them $3.5 million, taking their next five No. 1 picks and suspending Taylor and McHale for a season. (Two of the picks have since been returned, presumably for good behavior.)

2000-01: The Timberwolves don’t die, going 47-35 and squeezing back into the playoffs, but against the No. 1-seeded Spurs, who dispatch them, 3-1.

2001-02: Not that they’re resilient or anything, but the Timberwolves start 33-16 before Brandon leaves with a knee injury, never to return.

They finish 50-32, getting their highest seeding, No. 5, but are swept, 3-0, by the high-powered Mavericks as Dirk Nowitzki outscores Garnett, 100-72.

The off-season is another bummer. Chauncey Billups, who took over for Brandon, signs with Detroit. The Timberwolves sign Ricky Davis to an offer sheet but Cleveland matches. Rodney Rogers turns down more money from them to play for $1 million in New Jersey. Felipe Lopez is lost for the season in camp.

2002-03: They go 51-31, carrying them all the way to No. 4, producing joy in the Twin Cities ... until Wednesday night.

Writes the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s Sid Hartman: “There are many getting their pens warmed up to write how the Wolves won’t get past the first round again -- thanks in part to a Portland team that went into the tank against the Clippers on Wednesday because it preferred to play Dallas and not the Wolves in the first round.”

In other words, it’s just business as usual here.

The Iron

Miner’s Son

You want to talk about a tough crowd?

While the Timberwolves were putting together yet another inspirational season, their attendance dropped 7% to 15,700 a game. Even with the Lakers in the equation, as of Saturday, Game 1 hadn’t sold out.

Valiant as their act is, it has worn thin. Locals note that six first-round exits in a row is an NBA record, and that no coach has ever survived after coaching six first-round losers in succession.

Community pressures notwithstanding, the pot doesn’t appear to be boiling under Saunders ... yet.

Highly regarded by peers (Portland General Manager Bob Whitsitt, known as a shrewd judge of talent, courted him two seasons ago, obliging the Timberwolves to give him a five-year, $15-million extension through ‘06), Saunders is also in tight with McHale, his old University of Minnesota teammate, and with Taylor.

Taylor isn’t much on interfering ... and McHale isn’t much on public opinion, or anyone’s opinion.

“You want to win,” McHale says, dismissing the skeptics, otherwise known as his hometown fans and press corps. “Everyone wants to win. If you don’t win, everyone gets disappointed. It’s a bottom-line business....

“Don’t take this wrong, I really don’t care what other people say. I mean, you’ve got to do your job and it doesn’t really bother me what other people think....

“I’ve always said, if I wanted to know where to put semicolons and apostrophes, I’d talk to journalism majors. I was a basketball player, that’s what I did.”

McHale may also have a version for agents, in which he says if he wants to know about clauses and loopholes, he talks to them. In any case, several recoil at the sound of his name, and vice versa. Taylor only held his ill-fated talks with Fleisher because the agent and the general manager were on such bad terms.

As a player, McHale was similarly brash. Most GMs are natural schmoozers, even the ones who were star players, like Jerry West. But then, McHale, the native of Hibbing, up in the mining country in the Mesabi Range, was never like anyone else.

This job is a labor of love, and hate, for him. He loves the basketball part and hates the rest.

But after all they’ve been through ... and he’s been through ... like getting suspended because his name was on that Smith contract too ... and all his hints about leaving, he’s still here.

“I’m not a traditionalist in some of those ways,” McHale says, “because there’s some people I deal with and some people I don’t deal with. Hey, I’m the son of an iron miner, man. He’d say, ‘If I don’t like you, I’ll tell you. And if you don’t like it, I don’t give a....’ ”

Better times may be coming. Brandon is expected to retire, and his $11.2-million salary to come off their cap after next season, giving them new flexibility.

Of course, Garnett’s contract runs out next season and now that he gets rapped whenever they get knocked out in the first round, he has become keenly interested in where they’re going and how they’re going to get there.

Another of Those Summers seems to await in 2004 but a lot can happen between now and then. Maybe even, for once, a break.