KG to return to a new look but tired aura

So much has happened since Kevin Garnett last played on Target Center’s floor.

For posterity’s sake, that was April 9, 2007, although nobody knew then he would never wear a Timberwolves uniform again after that 111-100 loss to Toronto.

He returns healthy tonight, nine months after he arrived injured with his new team and briefly said hello with a reverential bow before a game there last February.

Since he last played at Target Center, Garnett, of course, in one dizzying season with the reborn Celtics won an NBA championship that eluded him during 12 seasons in Minnesota.

Since then, his former team swapped out everything but perhaps the arena bathroom fixtures and Kevin McHale, a process so complete that even the rookie who just survived the first eight-game losing streak of his life has taken inventory.

“From the new players to the new court, the new uniforms, the new logo, we’ve pretty much changed everything around just trying to give us a new face,” Wolves forward Kevin Love said. “He’s a perennial All Star, a Hall of Famer guy, the face of the franchise. When people look back and say 'Minnesota Timberwolves,’ they say Kevin Garnett. For us, 1-8, 2-8 doesn’t really give you a new face. We need to go out there and show it on the court before we make a new name for ourselves.”

It says something about a franchise celebrating its 20th season that Garnett won two playoff series — the same spring, no less — in his 12 seasons and is considered the Michael Jordan of Minnesota basketball.

Does anyone here care?

Without him, a franchise that forced change because it concluded it was headed nowhere with him has traveled from public indifference during Garnett’s final season or two in Minnesota to irrelevance without him.

Add the team’s ticket packages sold and you get the equivalent of 5,000 full season tickets. Factor in meager television ratings and plenty of elbow room most game nights at Target Center for a team that followed last season’s 1-10 start with today’s 2-8 record and, well, it isn’t exactly like that old joke where the fan telephones the stadium box office to inquire about that night’s start time and in turn is asked what time he can make it.

But it’s not that far off.

The morning the Wolves and Celtics finalized the NBA’s largest trade ever for a single player, both teams’ player-personnel bosses by and large were considered buffoonish. Sixteen months later, Boston General Manager Danny Ainge is the genius who restored glory — and brought a 17th NBA title — to a sullied franchise that won 24 games one season and 66 the next after he supplemented Paul Pierce with Garnett and Ray Allen through summertime trades and then surrounded those stars with valuable, economical role players.

“We changed our players and we changed our culture,” Boston coach Doc Rivers said. “And when you do both, it usually turns out pretty good.”

McHale, the Wolves’ decision maker since 1995, is the guy who traded Brandon Roy for Randy Foye, who bypassed (like many other GMs) Josh Howard and took Ndudi Ebi instead, who traded away one of the game’s greatest players because he couldn’t surround him with winning talent and who is being second-guessed a month into the season for trading O.J. Mayo for Kevin Love and Mike Miller last summer.

Long-suffering Wolves fans watched Garnett lift the championship trophy and bellow victory last summer and wondered why, if it took Ainge only one season to do so in Boston, that never happened in Minnesota.

Ainge makes right moves

Ainge in four years accumulated enough assets that allowed him to swap a fifth overall pick in the 2007 draft for Allen and deal five players and two draft picks (one of which he already acquired from the Wolves) for Garnett.

He selected high-school player Al Jefferson with the 15th overall pick in 2004, then the Celtics developed him into a prospect enticing enough to be the trade centerpiece for a superstar. He also plucked Ryan Gomes with a second-round pick, acquired veteran Theo Ratliff’s huge expiring salary and drafted or traded for enough enticing players to both trade away (Gomes, Gerald Green, Sebastian Telfair) and keep for himself (Rajon Rondo, Leon Powe).

McHale, team owner Glen Taylor and the Wolves, meanwhile, were crippled by the illegal deal they made with free-agent Joe Smith in 1999 that cost them three first-round draft picks. You also might consider Garnett in 1995 to be McHale’s only real astute draft pick in 13 years on the job. He acquired long, limiting contracts attempting to surround an aging Garnett with such players as Marko Jaric and Mark Blount, then was able to dump those contracts in a rebuilding process that turned his team youthful and added three extra first-round draft picks and valuable salary-cap room in the next two seasons.

“We need to have something good happen to this team,” Wolves coach Randy Wittman said before his team ended its eight-game losing streak Wednesday against Philadelphia, “because there’s a lot of good going on here.”

The Celtics are set to contend for another title for at least the next two seasons. The Wolves are young and salary-cap flexible, but many questions remain about the players they’ve assembled, about whether they can entrust McHale with those future picks and salary-cap space and whether the franchise can afford to remain patient with players aged 20, 23, 25 in a league where champions emerge in their 30s.

An employee responsible for selling tickets and sponsorships was told the other day that, with this team and in this failing economy, he has a tougher job that Barack Obama. He smiled and said he wished he had the president-elect’s problems.