Confession time: I’ve always been kind of a closet Minnesota Timberwolves sympathizer. Of all the expansion franchises which came into the league in the late ’80s to mid ’90s, they felt the least like a marketing exercise. Minneapolis is underrated as a city, and while it will never be a destination like Miami or Orlando, placing a team there never felt to me like a calculated infiltration of a fertile foreign market like the NBA’s expansion into Toronto and Vancouver.
So basketball in Minnesota was more of a good-faith effort. Even their uniforms were relatively muted in the era of flaming basketballs, stars and pinstripes, purple cartoon dinosaurs and flying insects.