Glen Taylor: Moving forward, in a return to yesteryear

Once considered the man who would save Minnesota professional sports, Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor now just must convince his lone team's remaining supporters that there is reason to hope.

The former state legislator, a self-made billionaire, rescued the foundering NBA franchise from moving to New Orleans and from its own irrelevance when he bought it in 1994. He soon hired homegrown basketball star Kevin McHale to run his new team, and he bet the future on a precocious teenager named Kevin Garnett.

Fourteen years later, Garnett -- in one dizzying season with the Boston Celtics -- won an NBA title that so noticeably eluded him during 12 seasons in Minnesota. Taylor and McHale, meanwhile, steered the Wolves in a painful reprise of the team's expansion beginnings that initially alienated the team's dwindling fan base and left Taylor defending his loyalty to McHale while promising better days ahead soon.

"There is a plan," Taylor said recently.

That plan dramatically, perhaps remarkably, has remade the franchise since Taylor agreed last summer to send Garnett to Boston in a seismic swap that brought his team promising young players, massive salary-cap relief, future draft picks and provided Garnett and the Celtics such sudden triumph.

It also has returned the Wolves to what Taylor calls the charted course before the team lost its way with misguided personnel decisions -- some of them spectacularly so -- designed to surround their aging, expensive superstar with championship-contending teammates.

That return to the small-town Midwestern sensibilities that built Taylor's fortune brought him joy in a 22-victory season that Garnett's final two seasons with underachieving teammates in Minnesota had lacked.

"That's the only time since I owned the team that I felt that way," said Taylor, who made unsuccessful bids to buy the Vikings in 1998 and the Twins in 1999. "Something had to change."

So Garnett was dealt in the NBA's largest trade for a single player after he refused to accept a pay cut that would allow the Wolves salary-cap space to rebuild with youth. In June, Taylor watched the player he signed to two contract extensions worth more than $225 million lift the NBA championship trophy wearing Celtic green rather than Timberwolf blue, an achievement Taylor said his team might have reached in 2004 had Sam Cassell not been injured in the Western Conference finals.

"I didn't feel jealous," said Taylor, who said he left congratulatory phone messages for Garnett that went unreturned. "I was happy for Kevin. Do I say, 'Gee, why couldn't that have happened here?' Yes, but I don't harbor bad feelings against anybody. That [an NBA title] was my goal and you had him here, so it seems like it was the best chance of having a person of that caliber. We tried to bring people in around him. But quite frankly the last couple of years, we were going nowhere."

Influential and influenced

A mathematician by education and a billionaire by gut instinct, Taylor oversees more than 100 companies worth nearly $3 billion from a modest corner office on his Taylor Corp. campus in North Mankato, Minn.

The Timberwolves are but a blip in a portfolio born from a college job in a Mankato print shop that he transformed into ownership and eventually a wedding-invitation empire that now includes printing, marketing, electronics and agricultural businesses.

But, like his 10 years in the Legislature during the 1980s, Taylor's ownership of an NBA franchise has brought notoriety to a small-town Minnesotan whom McHale calls "so low-key, so unassuming, if you ran into him on the street you'd never know" the extent of his wealth.

In his 14 years in the league, he has been punished and trusted unlike any other owner by NBA Commissioner David Stern. Taylor's secretive, illegal signing of free-agent Joe Smith in 1999 cost the team an unprecedented five first-round draft picks, a $3.5 million fine and crippled the franchise seemingly in perpetuity. (The penalty was later reduced to three first-rounders.)

Taylor also is an influential member on league committees for its financial reviews, revenue sharing and NBA China operation because of what Wolves Chief Executive Rob Moor calls his "astute" decisionmaking and uncanny ability to identify the crucial element of a complex problem.

Taylor partly attributes that last gift to his skills as a "good outliner," learned while taking class notes when he was a busy father, college student and employee.

"They put the guys they trust the most the closest to the money," Moor said of the NBA. "That's where Glen is."

When he was a Republican state senator, Taylor grew accustomed to his constituents' wrath after he cast an unpopular vote. That experience prepared him for owning a professional sports team, and when he traded Garnett, some fans told him without hesitation that he had rid the franchise of the wrong Kevin.

Even comedian Chris Rock, onstage in Minneapolis last month, called the trade the worst he had ever heard in his life.

"I don't defend myself and I don't defend Kevin and say mistakes haven't been made," Taylor said. "People think I'm way too loyal to Kevin and I should replace him. Maybe I'm really pretty loyal and maybe I get a little stubborn in my loyalty, but that loyalty probably goes into all my businesses. It isn't that people haven't lost me a million dollars on some decision before. Those are the same people who sometimes make really good decisions.

"If I worried about Kevin's integrity, he wouldn't be here for a minute. If I worried about whether he really cared or not. ... Those are the things that are critical to me. I know he doesn't do anything bad because he's lazy or because he's not intelligent. He takes risks and he has been wrong on some of those risks. If I knew somebody who could make it right all the time, I wouldn't have any trouble having that person work for me."

Following a plan

Instead, Taylor, 67, directed his team managers to rediscover the values he intended for the Timberwolves when the team drafted Garnett and Stephon Marbury in consecutive summers, intending for the two gifted youngsters and the franchise to grow up together. The Wolves made the playoffs for the first time in 1997, a sudden rise that left many Minnesota sports fans eager for Taylor to buy the Vikings and the Twins when each was available in the next two years.

That was before the record $126 million contract Taylor paid Garnett shut down the NBA for a season, before Marbury forced a trade to New Jersey, before Taylor struck that illegal contract with Smith.

Nine years later, the team has philosophically returned to its roots. Formulated in countless staff meetings, scribbled onto a note pad and formally presented to season-ticket holders, a "Blueprint for the Future" is based upon such touchstones as personal integrity, commitment to youth and patience.

"Practice hard, play hard, be good, all that type of stuff," Taylor said, describing his team's reclaimed vision after it bought out or traded away bloated contracts belonging to Troy Hudson, Mark Blount, Mike James and Marko Jaric and signed youngsters Ryan Gomes, Craig Smith and Sebastian Telfair to reasonable, short-term deals.

To get there, Taylor has made his voice heard more often in staff meetings, and he has surrounded McHale with assistants Jim Stack, Rob Babcock, Fred Hoiberg and Zarko Durisic in an attempt to foster more discussion, better decisions and allow McHale, who had no management training when he agreed to lead the Wolves 13 years ago, to learn from his errors.

"I asked him to help me out, and he jumped in," Taylor said. "It's a learning process. You've got to give him the tools, the people around him who will challenge him, who will question him earlier in the process. We have done that. And he has not fought that. Some people fight that type of thing.

"We sit down as a group now, and I'm telling you they don't always agree with Kevin and Kevin doesn't always agree with them. But I think the results are better. They're coming up with better conclusions."

Back to the future

In time, Taylor said he expects that Hoiberg will replace McHale when McHale decides it's time to step away.

"At least we're going to train Fred," Taylor said. "He's in every meeting, he's in on everything. I don't know that Fred would make better decisions than Kevin would. What's interesting now is they don't always agree. That's interesting to me. They challenge each other. I think they make each other better."

In the past 13 months, the Wolves have traded away their superstar and rebuilt their roster with three players, including young star Al Jefferson, acquired in the Garnett trade. They've also stockpiled three additional future first-round picks and cleverly will have cleared salary-cap room to become a factor in the free-agent market the next two summers if they can show a prospective star player that they're aimed toward a championship.

Taylor said the franchise lost more than $10 million last season but didn't reach the $25 million lost a few seasons back when it surpassed the NBA's luxury-tax threshold.

"I want to win," he said. "In some of your businesses, you try to maximize profit. My co-owners with the Timberwolves, we want to win. We don't have to make a lot of money doing it, but we don't want to lose money, either."

Moor called his boss as "engaged" in the team's operations as he has ever been.

"When you're a very, very talented person, you tend to go toward the thing that challenges you," Moor said. "If anything's too easy, it doesn't keep his attention. Sports is such a challenging environment to be consistently successful. There's not many things that can challenge Glen Taylor. He has accomplished quite a bit."

Taylor said he believes that, in little more than a year, he and his team have come back to where they were in the beginning, when he stepped forth and bought the Wolves from original owners Marv Wolfenson and Harvey Ratner after Commissioner Stern blocked a sale and a move to New Orleans. Once again, they are aimed toward success with a young, growing team built upon ideals that "can make Minnesotans proud."

"Do I think we have a plan? Yes," Taylor said. "Do I think we've followed it? Yes. Am I happy with it? Yes. Now we have to do better this year, which means we have to get more wins."