Flashback? Not even close

Those who think the Wolves are back at the beginning are wrong. The players are better. The stories ... probably not.

By Jerry Zgoda, Star Tribune

Last update: November 4, 2007 - 11:24 PM

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WOLVES WEEK IN REVIEW Record: 0-1 (lost 99-91 to Denver on Friday) The Wolves reached their 15-player roster limit Monday by buying out Juwan Howards contract and releasing Wayne Simien, acquired from Miami in the Ricky Davis-Antoine Walker deal. Management burned the lights late at Target Center on Wednesday, when the team signed Al Jefferson to a contract extension just before the 11 p.m. deadline. STAR TRIBUNES STAR OF THE WEEK: Al Jefferson, forward/center The big event was late Wednesday night, when Big Al drove hurriedly to Target Center and signed his five-year, $65 million contract extension just before an 11 p.m. deadline. THIS WEEK: Four games Today: at New York, 5 p.m. Tuesday: vs. Orlando, 7 p.m. Friday: at L.A. Lakers, 9:30 p.m. Saturday: at Sacramento, 9 p.m. • The season's first full week takes the Wolves from coast to coast: From New York City, where newly acquired Knick Zach Randolph promises he won't get into the same trouble in Gotham that he did in sleepy Portland, to Los Angeles, where the Kobe Bryant melodrama could still be in full Hollywood swing. JERRY ZGODA

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Extrapolated from e-mails received and Internet blogs perused, the cynics, the skeptics or just about anybody who endured 17 of the Timberwolves' first 18 seasons believe the franchise has returned to the days before Kevin Garnett arrived in 1995.

That means, back to the expansion days.

This collection of Timberwolves, completely reconfigured after Garnett was dealt in July for five players and two draft picks, is no expansion team.

I know. I was there, having covered the team's first four seasons and having missed the entire Garnett era.

Nobody possibly could be as lovable and dysfunctional as those early Timberwolves.

They are unforgettable because of their total forgetability: Sidney Lowe, Tony Campbell, Pooh Richardson, Scott Roth, Tod Murphy, Scottie Brooks, Sam Mitchell, Randy Breuer, Brad Lohaus, Felton Spencer, Gary Leonard, Marlon Maxey, Adrian Branch, Jim Thomas, Myron Brown, Gerald Glass, Dan Godfread and too many others to mention.

This season's remade Timberwolves very well might not win as many games as the Bill Musselman-coached Wolves did in the franchise's second season, when he punched the pedal and his team won six of its final eight games to finish 29-53. That finish helped assure them of Luc Longley in that next summer's draft rather, say, than Larry Johnson or Dikembe Mutombo.

These Timberwolves now have real NBA talent -- Al Jefferson, Corey Brewer, Randy Foye, Antoine Walker -- and something those early Wolves teams didn't: a chosen direction.

Kevin McHale and Randy Wittman have committed themselves to their team's youth: Eight players under 24 years old, nine youngsters if you include Ryan Gomes, who turned 25 in September.

Health-club owners Marv Wolfenson and Harvey Ratner brought the NBA to Minnesota and then hired a coach -- Musselman, born to win today -- and a personnel guy, current Wolves radio commentator Billy McKinney, who focused on the future.

That dichotomy produced teams that won 22 and 29 games in Musselman's two seasons, then never won more than 21 games the next four seasons under new personnel directors and a parade of coaches that included Jimmy Rodgers, Lowe and Bill Blair until Garnett arrived.

All that losing still never brought any lottery luck. But it did bring characters and memorable moments.

Nearly 20 years later, has there been a better postgame quote uttered than when Campbell suffered a tailbone injury and declared earnestly, "My gluteus maximus hurteus enormous."

Musselman walked a wire between genius and competitive irrationality at the University of Minnesota and in nearly every pro league there has been until his death in 2000. He gave the franchise's new fans competitive teams culled from a collection of castoffs.

As the losses mounted and the seasons passed, those souls covering the team sought ways to entertain themselves. During late-night West Coast games, a lone caller to the halftime radio show inevitably would phone and rip one of the team's two announcers, Kevin Harlan and Tom Hanneman. The caller? Harlan or Hanneman using a disguised voice to rip himself.

Harlan picked a different vocabulary word every night, one that he and the team's newspaper beat reporters were supposed to use in their accounts of the game.

Late one night in a blowout loss, Sacramento fans looked at each other courtside and shrugged their shoulders when Harlan bolted out of his seat, threw his hands to the rafters and bellowed, "Ladies and gentlemen, Tyrone Corbin just drove the lane with impunity."

Jerry Zgoda jzgoda@startribune.com