His efforts rejected the first time he accepted the Timberwolves coaching job, Flip Saunders is back again two decades later. This time it's with an open heart and open mind, yet he promises he'll demand just as much as when he was a younger man who formed rookie Stephon Marbury into an NBA point guard.
Bill Musselman was his demanding coach when Saunders was a freshman point guard at the University of Minnesota 40 years ago. That's the way Saunders has coached from his Continental Basketball Association years right through NBA jobs with the Wolves, Detroit, Washington and back again, prodding at one turn and providing enough freedom at the next to such players as Chauncey Billups, Sam Cassell and John Wall.
"I've had great success with guys," Saunders said, "but I'm hard on point guards."
This time his pupil is Ricky Rubio, in his fourth season with the Wolves, and with whom Saunders has entrusted his point guard-driven system in an association that will go far toward determining their team's success this season and beyond.
With Kevin Love now gone to Cleveland, Rubio steps forth as something of the franchise's face and team leader at a time his agent is negotiating a long-term future in Minnesota. The results of those conversations could be agreed upon by late Friday night's deadline.
Saunders' arrival as Wolves president of basketball operations and then coach wasn't enough to convince Love to stay. Now the union he forges in both jobs with Rubio will shape the young point guard's career arc and the franchise's future as well.
Saunders never played the game beyond college, and Rubio plays it with a proficiency and flare that Saunders might not always find familiar, but in many ways they consider themselves the same.
"He knows how a point guard feels," Rubio said. "Every player is different. But at point guard, if you want to share the ball and make your teammates better, like I have to do, he used to do it, too. It's something we share."