McHale, Saunders set to meet as fellow NBA head coaches

MEXICO CITY – Thirty-eight years after they first met, Flip Saunders and Kevin McHale come together again Wednesday night in Mexico City, where purportedly they will coach against each other when the Timberwolves play Houston.

Former college teammates, Wolves front-office comrades and essentially lifelong friends whose relationship has waxed and waned as certain as the forthcoming tide, they will work opposite sidelines for the second time in their basketball careers.

Just don't tell either man that because each thinks it might be the first.

"Is this the first time I've coached against him?" McHale asked Tuesday afternoon inside the Mexico City Arena. "No? Well, there you go. I guess it shows you what it means. I didn't even remember that."

McHale was just 13 games into the job as the Rockets' new coach when his team went to play Saunders' Washington team in a January 2012 Martin Luther King Day matinee that, it turns out, came just a week before the Wizards fired Saunders after a 2-15 season start.

The Rockets won the game that Monday afternoon 114-106. Kevin Martin scored 25 points for the visitors, Chase Budinger added eight points off the bench. Neither current Timberwolves player remembers a thing about that game, but they shouldn't feel badly about it.

"I don't even recall that," Saunders said. "Was it one time?"

McHale and Saunders have arrived back together to play one of the NBA's "Global Games" Wednesday after each took such different journeys to get there: McHale is the 1980 No. 3 overall draft pick who won three championships with the Boston Celtics and made himself into a Hall of Fame player whom Charles Barkley still calls the toughest opponent he ever faced. Saunders is the formerly driven point guard with limited game who made himself into a coach and worked his way from college assistant jobs to pro basketball's minor leagues. He finally reached the NBA after his college teammate accepted Taylor's offer to run the Wolves and called Saunders to help with that big job.

Saunders had grabbed his massive playbook and drove from his Continental Basketball Association job in Sioux Falls, S.D., the previous year to meet in Mankato, Minn., with new Wolves owner Glen Taylor after he just purchased the team in 1994. But it wasn't until McHale, at Taylor's request, decided to accept a promotion from what Saunders called "Jack of All Trades" — Wolves assistant GM, big-man coach, television analyst — to run the franchise that Saunders got his big break.

"The reason I got to the NBA is because of Kevin," Saunders said, "no question."

Each has moved on in the many years since they teamed together to select a high-school player named Kevin Garnett fifth overall in 1995, a decision that changed their lives and their careers. A decade later — after they guided the Wolves to eight consecutive playoff appearances, including the 2004 Western Conference finals — McHale the General Manager fired Saunders the Coach.

The friends who once ate lunch together regularly and talked every day went their different ways. Saunders moved on to coaching gigs with Detroit and Washington and an ESPN job before Taylor brought him back to the franchise in May 2013 with a move that has made him as part-owner, president of basketball operations and now coach and one of the most powerful executives in the NBA.

McHale managed the Wolves for another four years before Taylor replaced him as top executive with lawyer and former sportswriter David Kahn, who then decided to fire McHale as the coach as well. It was a juxtaposition one longtime NBA observer once called "like Ahmad Rashad firing Walter Cronkite." McHale worked for TNT before he accepted a full-time coaching job for the first time.

McHale essentially has declined to answer any questions about his Timberwolves years since he accepted the Rockets job, answering with a question or very few words as if, at least publicly, that time never existed.

When asked playfully if he thought Saunders crazy for getting back into coaching again with a relatively young team at age 59, McHale replied, "Oh, you'd have to ask Flip."

Saunders, in turn, talked about McHale at length on Tuesday after the Wolves practiced for Wednesday's game, which comes 11 months after they traveled to Mexico City but never played San Antonio because of an arena fire on game night.

Friends, now friendly

Saunders calls their changed relationship simply a matter of colleagues who don't work together anymore and said the two remain friendly after McHale fired him when the Wolves started the 2004-05 season with a 25-26 record, just months after they had reached the Western Conference finals together.

"We've talked about things," Saunders said. "I have a lot of guys in this league I'm close to, but we don't do what we did before when we were on the same team. When you're on the same team, you do things together.

''But we've talked about things. We have an understanding where we're at. We're just two guys with different teams who went separate ways.

"It was never a situation where we'd see each other and we wouldn't talk to each or ask how the other's family is doing. I've got great respect for what he has been able to do and how he has been able to stick with it.

''He has done a phenomenal job with that team. He has gone through some adjustments over the last few years with his personal life and everything else that no one else can understand."

McHale's daughter, Sasha, died in November 2012 at age 23 from lupus-related complications.

"I can't imagine ever having to go through something like that," Saunders said.

At age 59, Saunders is back coaching after nearly three years away. At age 56, McHale as well continues to coach, a job he only previously accepted on an interim basis and once claimed he'd never do because of the constant travel.

"This is the closest you're going to get to it when you're done playing, as far as that close to the action," said Wolves assistant coach Sam Mitchell, who played for the team when McHale and Saunders ran the show and who himself was an NBA head coach and TV commentator.

"You're never going to get back the feeling of playing, but coaching, it's awfully close. On TV, you don't have a side. You're not attached to anything. You're just talking about what you see.

"When you're coaching, you're picking a side. It makes a difference. What keeps you in this game — or what brings you back — is the competition, the camaraderie. I'm not surprised to see either of those two guys still doing this."

He is surprised, though, like everyone else that Saunders and McHale have faced each other as coaches before.

"Who won?" Mitchell asked. "Well, Flip's got a chance to get him back and get him even then."