The Minnesota Timberwolves had to return to practice on Monday after losing their beloved coach, mentor, and friend, Flip Saunders, to cancer yesterday. Saunders battled with Hodgkin’s lymphoma which left him hospitalized for over a month and unable to communicate with the team. He was not set to coach the team this season.
It’s going to be an emotional week for the Timberwolves as they open the season against the Lakers on Wednesday. They had a chance to reminisce and recall the impact Saunders had on the re-igniting the organization, with some touching words from players and staff.
“His imprint is on this building,” interim coach Sam Mitchell said, looking at the state-of-the-art practice facility that opened this summer. “It’s on the Target Center. Every one of us, from players to coaches to a lot of guys in basketball ops, they were hand-picked by Flip. He wanted us here. He wanted what he called his Timberwolves family around him, people that he had confidence in, that he trusted. So that’s tough because we all came back because of him.”
Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor:
“Flip was the person that brought this family together,” Taylor said. “He recruited the players, the staff and was a friend of mine. It’s easy for me to say that we were family and he was a very, very important part of the leadership of that family.”
“I don’t think Kevin would have come back in any other circumstances without Flip being the person to ask him or to talk to him about it,” Taylor said.
Saunders returned to the Wolves as team president in 2013 after serving as general manager from 1995 to 2005. The team hasn’t been to the playoffs since 2004, one year before Saunders was let go as GM. His return resulted in Kevin Garnett’s return to Minnesota after his stint with the Brooklyn Nets.
What Saunders meant to someone like Garnett, who Saunders drafted to Minnesota in 1996, is substantial, but it’s also evident that he impacted the younger members of the Timberwolves whom he had a hand in drafting recently — Karl-Anthony Towns, Andrew Wiggins, Shabazz Muhammad, and the quoted Ricky Rubio and Zach LaVine.
“What we have over here is a family,” Rubio said, “and we lost our dad yesterday.”
“You just got to thank the world for him,” LaVine said. “I’m going to go out there and do everything I can to show him and show the world and this organization his vision for this team, it’s not going to die. We’re going to go out there and put on for him.”
Saunders’ legacy in Minnesota might just live out through this era of Timberwolves basketball.
