Minnesota Timberwolves

Minnesota Timberwolves

The Minnesota Timberwolves are an American professional basketball team based in Minneapolis. Founded in 1989, the team is owned by Glen Taylor who also owns the WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx. The Wolves are a member of the National Basketball Association’s Western Conference Northwest Division. In 2018, the Wolves ended a 14-year playoff drought when they return to the postseason in 2018.

About Minnesota Timberwolves in brief

Summary Minnesota TimberwolvesThe Minnesota Timberwolves are an American professional basketball team based in Minneapolis. Founded in 1989, the team is owned by Glen Taylor who also owns the WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx. The Timberwolves play their home games at Target Center, their home since 1990. The Wolves are a member of the National Basketball Association’s Western Conference Northwest Division. The team won their first division championship in 2004 and advanced to the Western Conference Finals that same season. In the 1995 NBA draft, the Timberwolves selected high school star Kevin Garnett in the first round. Garnett went on to average 10 ppg in his rookie season as the Wolves finished in 5th place in the Midwest Division. He was traded to the Boston Celtics in 2007, but returned to the Timberwolves in a February 2015 trade and finished his career there, retiring in the 2016 offseason. In 2018, the Wolves ended a 14-year playoff drought when they return to the postseason in 2018. There were two American Basketball Association franchises, the Minnesota Muskies, in 1967 and 1968, and the Minnesota Pipers, in 1968 and 1969. The franchise conducted a \”name the team\” contest and eventually selected two finalists, \”Timberwolves\” and \”Polars\”, in December 1986. The team then asked the 842 city councils in Minnesota to select the winner and ‘Timberwolf’s’ prevailed by nearly 2–1.

The NBA granted one of its four new expansion teams on April 22, 1987 to original owners Harvey Ratner and Marv Wolfenson to begin play for the 1989–90 season. They debuted on November 3, 1989, losing to the Seattle SuperSonics on the road 106–94. Five days later, they made their home debut at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, losing to the Chicago Bulls 96–84. This included a crowd of 49,551 on April 17, 1990, which saw the Timberwolves lose to the Denver Nuggets 99–88 in the final home game of the season. The next season, they moved into their permanent home, the Target Center and improved somewhat, finishing 29–53. However, they fired their head coach, Bill Musselman. They fared far worse in the 1991–92 NBA season under ex-Celtics coach Jimmy Rodgers, finishing with an NBA-worst 15–67 record. They finished 21–61 in 1994–95 and 20–62 the next two seasons. In 1996, Christian Laettner was traded along with Sean Rooks to the Atlanta Hawks for Andrew Lang and Spud Webb. These trades paved the way for rookie star Tom Gugliotta to become the Wolves’ first-round pick in the 1996 NBA draft. In 1997, Wolves added the 26-year-old forward Kevin Garnet to the team to go inside-to-to become the team’s star player inside and outside. In 1998, the NBA granted the Wolves a franchise extension to keep the team in the Twin Cities.