Chasing Stephon: Inside the Last Two Tantalizing, Torturous Decades of Timberwolves Fandom
The Minnesota Timberwolves traded one of the most important players to ever rock the pine-tree-lined jerseys 20 years ago today. Terry Horstman shares some thoughts on the team’s uncertain present, some dreams of a bright future, and some reflections on the tortured past of the worst franchise in NBA history
The final seconds were ticking off the clock of the first NBA playoff game the Minnesota Timberwolves ever played in front of their home crowd. Each member of the sold-out arena rose to fill the building with their voice, breath, and appreciation. The crowd’s roar crescendoed as each second melted away, culminating in the ear-splitting horn that comes when the clock expires.
The Timberwolves’ 1996–97 season, the best season of professional basketball Minnesotans had seen in four decades, was over. The final score read 125–120 in favor of the mighty Houston Rockets, a veteran team with multiple Hall of Famers poised for one last championship run. The young Timberwolves had never gone this far, and their inexperience showed as the two-time champion Rockets swept them out of the playoffs in three games.
Down on the court, the Timberwolves’ Stephon Marbury and Kevin Garnett — ages 19 and 20 — embraced and consoled each other after the first season-ending loss of their young careers. The Rockets’ Charles Barkley noticed them, and the future Hall of Famer walked away from his team’s muted celebration to comfort Minnesota’s two rising stars, granting the duo reason to believe this night was the first chapter in a magical story yet to be written.
Marbury and Garnett walked off the floor. The team’s disappointed-yet-hope-filled fans filed out of the arena and into the night. Everyone in the building believed they had just witnessed the start of something special, presuming the image of Garnett and Marbury drawn to each other after their first professional failure would one day be iconic. All everyone thought they had to do was wait.
It’s April 11, 2018. The Target Center in downtown Minneapolis is hosting the biggest party in Minnesota tonight. It’s been a long time since that’s been the case for a regular season Timberwolves game. It’s also been a long time since the team played a game in April that mattered.
The Target Center sits across the street from First Ave, the epochal concert venue that, music legend and Timberwolves fanatic, Prince made famous. It sits blocks away from where the Minneapolis Auditorium, home of the Minneapolis Lakers and the NBA’s first dynasty, once stood. But not one of the 20,000 Minnesotans inside are sitting, and every one of us is ready to tear the roof off the newly renovated home of our hard-luck team.
Eighty-one games are in the rearview mirror. A season’s worth of triumphs and failures have culminated in this moment — one final game against the division rival Denver Nuggets. The winners of the game clinch the eighth seed in the Western Conference and get to taste playoff basketball, while the losers get sent home.
Neon lights of the Wolves’ navy blue and bright green illuminate the crowd when the lights go out. A drumline creates a rhythmic ruckus on the court. Every fan is howling and asingle spotlight shines on Minnesota’s starting lineup as they wait to be announced.
The first Timberwolf introduced to the crowd is Jimmy Butler, one of the twenty best basketball players on the planet and the franchise’s prized offseason acquisition of last summer. Jimmy is one of a handful of players in the league who could immediately turn the Timberwolves and their abundance of young talent into contenders. The crowd salutes him as such.
The next member of the Wolves’ talented big three to be announced is Andrew Wiggins. A hyper-athletic kid from Canada who has been famous in basketball circles since he was fourteen years old, when his YouTube highlights earned him the nickname ‘Maple Jordan.’ But the dynamic player out of the University of Kansas hasn’t lived up to his billing as a former №1 overall draft pick. His day-to-day regimen is subject to more focus and scrutiny than any of his teammates. How easy it is to forget the kid just turned 23.
Karl-Anthony Towns is the last to be announced and receives arguably as loud of an ovation as Butler, and for good reason. Towns sports a seven-foot body filled to the brim with athleticism and power. The Timberwolves selected the University of Kentucky product with the №1 overall draft pick in 2015, and he’s been the closest reminder to Garnett that Wolves fans have since seen. The way Towns moves, scores, and runs for a man of his stature shouldn’t be allowed by the rules of the league or possible by the laws of physics. He’s outrageously talented and might already be a better player than Butler, but the 22-year-old still falls victim to the shortcomings of youth more often than his critics would like to see.
The last time any Wolves player received this kind of boisterous praise occurred 5,065 days ago. It was May of 2004. The face of Timberwolves basketball and future Hall of Famer Kevin Garnett was named the NBA’s Most Valuable Player. The first player in franchise history to win the award and the first professional basketball player in Minnesota to be named MVP since 1948, when George Mikan of the Minneapolis Lakers earned the honor. Garnett received the Maurice Podoloff Trophy before Game One of the Western Conference Semifinals against the Sacramento Kings in front of a capacity crowd. Commissioner David Stern handed Garnett the beautiful trophy to thunderous applause from his biggest fans; Minneapolis felt like the center of the basketball universe. The MVP held his prize up high for all of two seconds before calling his teammates over to share the moment with him.
Thousands of Wolves fans flooded out of the Target Center and into the streets of downtown Minneapolis after narrowly defeating the Kings in a series-clinching seventh game. They danced, they hugged, the hated Los Angeles Lakers were waiting for the Wolves in the next round and the infamous chant of “BEAT L.A.” echoed through the city all night.
The two playoff series the team won that season remain as the only two postseason victories in franchise history. The Timberwolves have yet to return to the playoffs since 2004, one of the longest active postseason droughts in all of professional sports. The 2017–18 season marked the first one in fourteen years where a playoff appearance at the end of the regular season was believed to be a certainty. All because of the man they traded for on draft night.
Butler officially became a Timberwolf ten months prior to the winner-takes-all game against the Nuggets. Fans descended upon downtown Minneapolis, where the team was hosting multiple viewing parties for the 2017 NBA Draft. The Wolves held the seventh-overall pick, and by the time the draft kicked off in Brooklyn, rumors had circulated through the basketball world that the Wolves had no plans of using their pick on a young college player. They had their eyes set on someone much bigger. Someone who would instantly become the best player in franchise history not named Kevin Garnett.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver stepped to the podium and announced that the Wolves were sending their pick, along with youngsters Zach LaVine and Kris Dunn, to the Chicago Bulls in exchange for Butler and the sixteenth overall choice. Downtown Minneapolis erupted. It felt like the Wolves had just won the Finals, and the collective joy from the viewing parties spilled out of the bars and into the downtown streets the same way it had fourteen long years ago.
This type of celebration — dancing in the streets, hugging strangers, maybe even some excessive crying — is a custom usually reserved for championship victories. But it had been far too long of a wait in NBA purgatory for Wolves fans to just stand there and clap.
The energy and exuberance for the most important regular season game ever played in this building is as charged up as it was on that warm June evening when we found out Butler was coming to town. Given how long of a road it’s been to get back to this kind of optimism, the whole scene is difficult to comprehend. Playoff-level basketball used to be played on this court every night of every season with local legends like Prince and Jimmy Jam sitting courtside. I was just a boy going to games back then. Now I’m in my 30s, standing through the pageantry of the starting lineups next to a friend who has experienced all the same Timberwolves heartbreak as I have. Neither of us have watched our team in the playoffs since we were old enough to drive, but I can still hear my dad’s voice from those early years as the pregame festivities conclude and both teams take the court.
“If this team can stay together, Terry,” he’d often say as we watched Garnett, Marbury, and the rest of the Wolves blossom into winners, “they will win championships.”
My eyes scan the crowd and see kids in oversized jerseys standing next to their parents, kids who weren’t alive when Garnett got to hoist the beautiful trophy that’s given to the best basketball player on the planet. It amazes me this is the biggest Wolves game they’ve ever been to. “If they can stay together, Terry, they will win championships.”
The game tips off.
The narrative arc of professional basketball in this town tells a larger story of the Twin Cities themselves. Understanding it is to understand the fabric that makes the Minneapolis/Saint Paul area what it is. A bustling and growing metropolis cloaked under a cloud of insecurity.
Minneapolis got its first taste of professional basketball greatness in the 1950s. The Minneapolis Lakers won five NBA championships in a span of six years, becoming the league’s first dynasty and turning the Minneapolis Auditorium into one of the grandest basketball stages in the world. The glory was short lived.
Minneapolis got its first taste of professional basketball heartbreak when the Lakers relocated to Los Angeles in 1960. The team and its owner Bob Short took everything with them. The classic powder blue and gold uniforms, the breathtaking Elgin Baylor — who was coming off his first two seasons and on his way to becoming one of the best players ever — the five championship banners from the rafters of the auditorium, and the name “Lakers.”
Long before the Laker dynasty tipped off, basketball had already laid its roots in the Twin Cities. In 1895, within four years of the sport’s creation by Canadian physician Dr. James Naismith, the first ever intercollegiate basketball game took place at Hamline University in Saint Paul. The hosts lost the historic occasion to the Minnesota State School of Agriculture by a thrilling final score of 9–3.
That game played with peach baskets, goalkeepers, and nine-foot ceilings in the basement of Hamline’s Hall of Science didn’t mirror basketball as we know it today, but its status as the first game ever played between two universities is monumental. The first ever intercollegiate game was played here. The first ever professional dynasty hung its banners here. Yet the entire state has spent the majority of the league’s existence secluded in NBA wilderness.
The wilderness is where the latest edition of NBA basketball in Minnesota has belonged, both in practice and in name. Awarded an expansion team to begin play in the 1989–90 season, Minnesota’s first professional basketball team since the Lakers was named the Timberwolves and played its first season under the off-white teflon sky of the Hubert H Humphrey Metrodome. The first chapter of Timberwolves lore was historic. The team earned a single-season NBA attendance record as 1,072,572 fans found their way into the Dome’s plastic blue seats. The team earned almost nothing else for the next six years.
Things got fun in 1995. The Timberwolves failed to hit the 30-win mark in each of their first seven seasons, but the ‘95–96 campaign featured the promising play of a young Kevin Garnett, the gangly teenager whose NBA career started when he was selected by the Timberwolves in the 1995 NBA Draft three weeks after he attended his high school prom.
Garnett took his lumps as a rookie, but flashed the freakish talent that would make him a force to be reckoned with for years to come. A year after making Garnett the first player drafted out of high school in two decades, Minnesota added another supremely talented young player who also happened to be Garnett’s best friend. A player who became the most polarizing, exciting, and enigmatic talent this town had seen. A young man from Coney Island, New York named Stephon Marbury.
Garnett may have been the generational athlete of the pair, a seven-footer who could run up and down the floor and fly through the air unlike any big man the game had seen to that point, but Marbury felt like the rarer talent. Garnett played excited while Marbury played furious. If each game were a canvas, Garnett played like an artist trying to paint the most beautiful picture possible so it could sit in front of generations of fans to be admired for ages. Marbury played like he wanted to set the canvas on fire, watch it burn, and dunk on the ashes.
Garnett brought the flash and an infectious smile. Marbury brought the mean streak and killer instinct. He brought an endless supply of Coney Island grit that felt so foreign in our snowy village in the Upper Midwest. We fell in love with him immediately.
Garnett and Marbury took Minnesota and the NBA by storm. It was like they had played together for years. Their chemistry was uncanny, and their style of play electrified the city. They were on the cover of Slam Magazine and in every commercial. Fans of other teams gravitated towards their charm. The team started winning. Garnett and teammate Tom Gugliotta became the first Timberwolves ever selected as NBA All-Stars. For the first time since 1960, a team in Minneapolis made the NBA Playoffs.
The Wolves clinched a spot in the tournament after a mid-April win against the Los Angeles Clippers in a game where Marbury was simply spectacular. When the horn sounded and the Wolves had officially punched their ticket to the playoffs, Garnett wrapped his arms around his best friend and carried him off the court. Both of them bobbed up and down and smiled with every muscle in their faces, showing the joy of two kids who never expected to make it this far and thus had no idea how far they could go. The best part about Garnett and Marbury loving each other was that they liked it here. The only thing standing between our beloved duo raising the city’s first NBA championship banner in almost forty years was the passage of the time.
The budding dynasty never bloomed.
During the ‘97–98 season, the Timberwolves attempted to secure their championship dreams of the future. The team signed Garnett to a six-year contract extension worth an unparalleled $126 million. The contract stood as the richest deal ever signed by a professional athlete until 2001, when the Texas Rangers doubled it by giving $252 million to Alex Rodriguez.
The move guaranteed Garnett would spend the entire prime of his career in Minnesota, but it left little room under the salary cap for the team to work with. A work stoppage delayed the start of the ‘98–99 season, the final year of Marbury’s rookie contract, and negotiations stalled between the Timberwolves and their star point guard. The more time passed without a deal in place, the more rumors circulated that, despite the success and smiles from the dynamic duo, the Timberwolves’ locker room was never utopian. Some said Marbury wanted to be the undisputed top player on his own team. Others said he felt alienated by Garnett’s massive deal and refused to play for a penny less. Most said he just wanted to be closer to his native New York.
Fearing they would lose him for nothing in the offseason after his contract expired, the Timberwolves traded Marbury to the New Jersey Nets on March 11, 1999. In return, they received veteran point guard Terrell Brandon, who was a solid player, but could never match the dynamic play of Marbury. The move broke up the most exciting pair a generation of basketball fans in Minnesota had ever known and cursed those same fans to an eternity of looking back through the pages of the team’s history to wonder what could have been.
Garnett led the Wolves to the playoffs in each of the subsequent six seasons. The 2004 season marked the only time the team advanced past the first round. Garnett was traded to the Boston Celtics in 2007, and the team spent most of the following decade in constant search of a new leader and a new era.
There are four banners dedicated to significant occasions in the history of Timberwolves basketball that have hung high above the court in the Target Center rafters. One of them honors the team’s aforementioned all-time attendance record and another celebrates the 2003–04 Midwestern Division Championship. The other two are hung in remembrance of tragedy rather than in celebration of joy. These are the two that stand out.
One banner wears the number “2,” in honor of former Timberwolves shooting guard Malik Sealy. Sealy signed with the Timberwolves as a free agent in January of 1999, just two months before the team traded Marbury. Garnett idolized Sealy as a child and wore №21 because it was the same number Sealy wore as a college basketball star at Saint John’s University. He wasn’t a budding superstar like Marbury, but his presence on the team was crucial. He became Garnett’s mentor in the wake of Marbury’s departure and helped a young man — who was making more money than anyone else in the league while simultaneously nicknamed “Da Kid” — grow up in ways only a stabilizing veteran player could provide.
Sealy was on his way home from Garnett’s 24th birthday party after the ‘99–2000 season. A drunk driver going the wrong way on the highway smashed into Sealy’s SUV and killed him instantly. He was thirty years old. The №2 will never be worn by a member of the Minnesota Timberwolves again.
The fourth and final banner bears no numbers or years, just the most all-encompassing four-letter word in the team’s history, “FLIP.” Phil “Flip” Saunders played college basketball at the University of Minnesota in the 1970s, but made his mark on Minnesota basketball as a coach and executive for the Timberwolves.
The Wolves hired Flip as their general manager on May 11, 1995. He eventually added head coach to his list of duties halfway through his first season and no one else steered the Wolves’ ship for ten years.
Flip led the Wolves to eight consecutive playoff appearances, and eventually, the Midwest Division Championship that’s immortalized in the rafters by his side. When the team struggled to capture the same magic the following year, Flip was fired and replaced by his University of Minnesota teammate and the president of basketball operations who hired him, Kevin McHale.
After following his decade in Minnesota with a near decade away from the Timberwolves’ organization, Flip returned as the president of basketball operations in May of 2013. His second stint with the organization would also not be confined to the front office and Flip named himself head coach of the Timberwolves before the ‘14–15 season.
Mathematically, Flip’s first season back at the helm was one of the worst in team history. The Wolves finished with 16 wins against 66 losses, the worst record in the league. But the the pros of that season outweighed the cons.
Flip coached Andrew Wiggins to the NBA’s Rookie of the Year award, making him the fourth teenager and the first Timberwolves player ever to earn the honor. Kevin Garnett became a Timberwolf once again after the team acquired him in a trade with the Brooklyn Nets halfway through the season and ignited the fanbase. The 16 wins may have been miles shy of earning the team a long awaited playoff berth, but they did earn the Wolves the best chance of winning the first overall pick of the 2015 NBA Draft Lottery. After the ping pong balls did their annual dance, the №1 overall pick was awarded to Flip and the Timberwolves. A pick Flip used to draft Karl-Anthony Towns.
When a reporter asked him about the experience of watching the №1 pick in the draft awarded to the Timberwolves for the first time in his franchise’s history, a verklempt Flip, who had lost his father shortly before the lottery, looked to the sky and said “As I said to our guys, sometimes you’ve got to have luck. And it was a great day.”
Doctors diagnosed Flip with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma two months later. He died three days before Towns played in his first game.
Jimmy Butler is everything he was promised to be. Watching him play is to watch the childhood dream from the days of Garnett and Marbury fully formed in one player. He plays defense as though the fate of the world rests on his making every single stop, like Garnett. He wears his hatred for losing on his sleeve and shows gusto in every one of his movements, like Marbury.
The most important game the Wolves have played in a decade and a half lives up to the hype. A beautifully played game by both teams ends up knotted at 101 points apiece at the end of regulation. The Wolves were up by eight late in the game, but couldn’t outlast the Nuggets’ scorching hot offense. Knowing Wolves heartbreak as well as I do, of course, Denver went and tied it. Of course we’re headed to overtime. Of course there’s more drama. Five more minutes is only right.
A foul sends Wiggins to the free throw line with a two-point lead and fourteen seconds left in the extra session. The look on the kid’s face is the same stoic, blank face he always wears and has been criticized his entire career for. He’s also been criticized his entire career for his free throw shooting. I’m only worried about the latter as he steps to the stripe.
Basketball is different from every other sport in the sense that the players are almost naked. Their bodies are covered the least and fans are allowed to sit closer to the athletes than they are for any other sport. A basketball player at the free throw line, nearly naked and alone with the game on pause and millions of eyes glued to their every move is sports’ most vulnerable position.
I can barely watch as the ball leaves Andrew’s fingertips and sails through the air. My mind replays every moment of Timberwolves-induced heartbreak I’ve experienced. If every previous version of this story is any indication, the ball will clang off of the back iron and the 20,000 people in attendance will groan exactly the same way at exactly the same time. Maybe Andrew will make the second free throw, maybe he won’t. Either way, it will give Denver another chance and the Timberwolves will eventually lose.
The ball doesn’t clang, though. It grazes the back iron and falls through the net in a way that creates the perfect little ‘ping!’ and gets the Wolves one point closer to victory. Wiggins smiles with his entire face and all of the doubt lingering in the crowd evaporates.
The ball kisses the rim twice on the second free throw, but finds its way down to give the Wolves the all-important four-point lead and gives fans permission to unleash a noise they’ve been waiting fourteen years to make.
I hug my friend. I hug the strangers next to us. I hug our entire section. I want to hug my dad, but the text message I receive from him moments after the final buzzer will more than suffice. “Howl, my son. We’re going to the playoffs!”
“You fucking need me! You can’t win without me!”
Butler and Towns walked off the court after the epic overtime win against Denver with their arms wrapped around one another. Even though a quick playoff exit against the super-charged Houston Rockets and MVP James Harden was inevitable, the scene was viewed as Butler and Towns walking hand-in-hand into a new and positive chapter of Minnesota basketball lore. They were supposed to get back to the playoffs and they did. The young Wolves were finally on their way.
And then they weren’t.
Despite reaching the postseason, the 2017–18 campaign was far from a smashing success. The Wolves held the №3 position in the Western Conference for much of the season, but tumbled to №8 when Butler missed a lengthy stretch to injury. Rumors that Butler was at odds with both Towns and Wiggins for not working as hard as he did circulated constantly. The team’s mediocre play without Butler amplified the rumors and turned what should have been a joyous return to playoff basketball into an 82-game slog rife with frustration and confusion.
On October 10, 2018, the weirdest day in Timberwolves history took place. Jimmy Butler stormed into the Timberwolves’ practice facility and waged war on the team he just went to the playoffs with. Butler had been estranged from the team since they were eliminated from the postseason in Game 5 of the Western Conference Quarterfinals in Houston. He was a notable absence on the team’s melancholy flight back to the Twin Cities and reportedly asked then head coach and president of basketball operations Tom Thibodeau to trade him four days later.
He saw most of his teammates again on October 10 for the first time in months when he walked into practice — weeks after training camp had started — and declared, “y’all better hurry up, I’m only here for an hour.”
Legend has it Jimmy then grabbed a group of reserve players and beat Towns, Wiggins, and the rest of the Wolves’ starters in a scrimmage. When the scrimmage was over, he stormed past general manager Scott Layden and screamed, “You fucking need me! You can’t win without me! I run this shit!” Then he got back in his car and drove to his house to sit down for a pre-arranged interview with ESPN’s Rachel Nichols.
The fear of losing a star player for nothing at the end of their contract was all too familiar for Wolves fans. The team traded him to the Philadelphia 76ers for Robert Covington and Dario Saric exactly one month after the infamous practice. The latest, weirdest, and quickest breakup in Timberwolves history was over.
Dear Steph,
It’s been 20 years, my old friend. As I write this letter, the Wolves are under .500, Karl-Anthony Towns just hurt his knee, missing the playoffs again is almost a certainty, and our all-time winning percentage during the league’s shot-clock era still ranks dead-last. Everything is really cool. So indulge me a little. Let’s go to a happier time.
Do you remember the Slam Magazine cover of you and Kevin? I do. I remember standing in the magazine aisle of Barnes & Noble after my saxophone lesson. I remember my mouth aching with a kind of pain so unfamiliar because it was my first year, and the horn and I were just getting to know each other, and I was learning the hard way what proper embouchure was. I remember the two of you looking back at me from the glossy cover. I remember believing you were the two most powerful superheroes on the planet.
Do you remember the headline, Stephon? “Showbiz & KG. MARBURY & GARNETT rule the world. Imagine that.” Imagine it I did, and my imagination ran wild.
The cover marked the moment Timberwolves basketball arrived. The Rockets knocked you out of the playoffs a few months prior, but that was old news. This was the cover of Slam’s ‘97–98 NBA Preview issue. A season everyone assumed to be Michael Jordan’s last dance. Why wasn’t he on the cover? Because you and Kevin could not be ignored. Michael would play one more season and get one more ring, but he was the past. You two were the future. I know I don’t need to ask if you remember beating Jordan and the Bulls when they came to Minneapolis that December. The ball you victoriously chucked into the sky as the final buzzer roared is still flying somewhere.
The looks on your faces represented a Timberwolves we had never seen before. A Timberwolves ready to move on from the cute little underdog narrative and evolve into winners. I knew from the way you both glared at me that no one would be able to stop you. I remember the sensation of being nine and overcome with the sincere belief that anything was possible.
The details of the photo were as exciting as your style of play. The necklaces over the sleeveless shooting shirts, the ice on your wrist, the way you held up the ball and balanced it against your skull, and the backwards visor sitting on Kevin’s head; not only were you two going to rule the world, you were going to look damn good doing it.
Do you remember the first time you came back to Minneapolis? It was your 23rd birthday. I remember we were late to the game, so my dad and I ran as fast as we could through the arena’s empty concourse, desperately trying to get to our seats in time. We failed, and through the closed cloth curtains of the section we were passing I heard your name. The sound that came after was something I had never heard in my life.
It’s a jarring experience to hear hatred. I’m sure you can relate. By 11, I had heard my first swear words coming from the stands of the arena. I heard boos, I heard grownups yell at officials over perceived blown calls, I heard all kinds of negativity come from the mouths of my fellow game-goers. The verbal venom we rained down on you when you came back to Minneapolis for the first time hit a level of disdain I had never heard before or since.
I joined in on that venom, Steph. I booed so loud and so hard every time you touched the ball. I yelled myself into physical pain by halftime, but I refused to stop. Every ounce of me believed you could hear me. Every ounce of me believed you could feel the same pain your departure caused us.
I didn’t notice how masterful your game was that day. I didn’t notice the way you manipulated space to unleash your devastating crossover on any defender foolish enough to get in your way. I didn’t notice you doing all the things that made me fall in love with you in the first place. I didn’t notice you were the best player on the floor. I just noticed you in enemy colors, hanging an L on the Timberwolves, and I hated you for it.
It didn’t stop there, unfortunately. Our entire fanbase continued to cheer against you for long after you were gone. I suppose painting you as a villain made it easier for us to move on without you. It was a coward’s way forward, but a way forward nonetheless.
A sign in the crowd on the day you came back to Minneapolis for the first time had your face on it with the words, “Never Be A Champ.” The N, B, and C were in bold capital letters, so you can bet it was featured prominently on the network’s nationally televised broadcast. It was there at the beginning of the game and it was still there after you dropped 39 points and led the Nets to victory. It remained the attitude of most Timberwolves fans as the rest of your rollercoaster NBA career unfolded. When you left the league entirely to blaze a new path in China, most of us said, ‘good riddance’ or, ‘who cares.’
We got our ill-placed wish. You never won an NBA Championship. We never did either and we, of course, blamed you for that. You did become the first big-name player to sell a signature shoe at the affordable price of $15 a pair, but we somehow found a way to ignore that too.
Maybe the Timberwolves would have been champions if you and Kevin stayed together. Maybe you would have raised as many banners as the Minneapolis Lakers did. Maybe you would both get your numbers retired so they could hang in the rafters forever next to Malik and Flip. Maybe they’d be retired at the same ceremony, so you and Kevin could walk back on the floor together and he’d lift you up in his arms and recreate the moment when you clinched a playoff spot for the first time. Maybe fans my age would be at the ceremony with our parents and our kids and three generations of fans could feel the inspiration radiating off the best basketball duo to ever live. We could educate the youngsters with tales of what it was like to watch you play and my dad would look out at the two of you on the court and say something like, ‘goddamn, those guys were fun.’ Maybe.
But maybe you don’t end up in China if all those things happen. Maybe instead of Beijing there’d be a statue of you in Minneapolis. Maybe instead of Beijing there’d be a museum of your life and your service in Coney Island.
I can’t remember the moment I stopped hating you for leaving the Wolves, but it hit me like a killer crossover that I had been missing the point as I watched your second basketball life unfold in China. You never won an NBA Championship, Steph, but no one else could have made the same global impact you did when you brought your mean streak, killer instinct, and endless supply of Coney Island grit to Chinese basketball. You are one of a kind, my friend.
I’m happy you left. Because I’m happy you got to have the journey you did. And I’m happy you found a nation of billions to love you the way we always wanted to, but never could.
I’m sorry for booing you. I’m sorry for hating you. I’m sorry for not understanding you. I’m sorry for convincing myself you weren’t as good as Terrell Brandon after we traded you (the most egregious of sins, clearly).
Thank you for helping me, and countless others, fall in love with basketball. I’ll never forget watching you play and the overwhelming joy that came with it.
With love,
Terry
Terry Horstman is the self-described all-time lowest scoring player in the history of Minnesota high school basketball. You can follow him on Twitter here.
