Hardwood Paroxysm’s favorite historical NBA teams

Long Live the 2003-04 Minnesota Timberwolves

By Steve McPherson (@steventurous)

Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” This is broadly true, of course, but there are also particular kinds of experiences so transformative that they practically re-order your DNA but nevertheless are hard to fully grasp as they’re happening. Like the first few sleepless and exhausted weeks after the birth of a child or falling in love, you are — as Darcy told Elizabeth — “in the middle before [you] knew that [you] had begun.”

This is how I think of the 2003-04 Minnesota Timberwolves, a team I dearly wish I could go back and re-experience now.

My life as a follower of basketball essentially falls across this team as if they were the Continental Divide. Prior to them, I at first liked the Dominique Wilkins-led Hawks of the early ‘90s. And then I enjoyed Iverson’s Sixers in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, plus loved every Vince Carter dunk from the moment I knew he existed on. And with my family having moved to Minnesota in the mid-’90s and me itinerant and moving all around from Connecticut to New York to Massachusetts and back, I adopted Kevin Garnett and his band of merry misfits as a home team of sorts beginning in 2000 or so.

In 2004, I moved to Minneapolis. Garnett had at last gotten some genuine firepower in Sam Cassell and Latrell Sprewell to go along with decent pieces like defensive specialist Trenton Hassell, stalwart big man Ervin Johnson and deadeye 3-point shooters Fred Hoiberg and Wally Szczerbiak. This team was FUN and gave Garnett the kind of support he needed to shine through and get the MVP trophy he probably deserved the year before.

But it was their playoff run to the Western Conference Finals that sealed it for me. I watched every game at the Groveland Tap in Saint Paul with friends both new and old, and I could feel myself being gathered up into the arms of something bigger. Maybe it was something as simple as proximity that caused it: I was finally IN the actual city where my favorite team played. Maybe it was the thrill of watching them battle against the Kings in the Conference Semis — still the best seven-game series in the NBA according to my heart, if not my head.

But whatever the reason, that postseason was a fulcrum in my life. I had to watch it all crumble for the Wolves when Cassell and Sprewell fell out with the team and they missed the playoffs the very next year. I didn’t become a season ticket holder until 2010, didn’t start writing about basketball until 2012. Hell, I wouldn’t start writing at all until 2005, when I began working as a music journalist. I didn’t walk out of the Groveland Tap after their dispiriting loss to the Lakers in Game 6 of the Conference Finals thinking something had changed in me, that something was different about the way I thought about basketball. I was too close to it to tell, but maybe it was letting it get that close that was the seed. By the time it grew into something I could talk about, could write about, could follow through box scores and highlights and then season tickets and eventually on press row, I was well past the beginning. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.