By Brennus Braaten
If there is one thing that Minnesota residents know, it’s that none of our major sports teams have had much success. However one thing that some people might not know is that in the 2000s the Minnesota Timberwolves had a real shot at winning a championship. They had acquired their star in Kevin Garnett and just needed a solid supporting cast to help him bring the Larry O’Brien trophy to Minneapolis. All of that changed in the summer of 2000 when the league found out about the illegal contract between the Minnesota Timberwolves and a player by the name of Joe Smith.
Joe Smith was drafted into the NBA in the 1995 draft by the Golden State Warriors. The Warriors liked the development they saw out of him and in the 1998-99 season they offered him an $80 million deal that he ended up turning down. This caused the Warriors to trade him halfway through the season and eventually Joe Smith entered the 1999 offseason free agency looking to get paid. Many teams were offering him lots of money, seeing how he was one of the top sought after players in that year’s offseason. What stumped a lot of people is the fact that he ended up signing a one-year $1.75 million contract with the Minnesota Timberwolves.
Now this one-year contract confused a lot of people but the deal was never looked into further. Eventually, before the start of the 2000 offseason, right before Smith was going to sign his third contract with the Timberwolves, agents Eric Fleisher and Andrew Miller split apart. Miller wanted to retain Joe Smith and his teammate Kevin Garnett. This caused Eric to sue Miller and that led to the revealing of many documents, including agreements to be able to avoid the NBA’s salary cap.
In order to do this the Timberwolves had an under the table agreement with Smith where they would sign him to three one-year deals for very little money which would then give the team his Bird rights. These rights would allow them to go over the salary cap and offer him more money than before. Due to these agreements Smith would have been able to sign an around $86 million deal with the Timberwolves. Well, this obviously wasn’t able to happen and the league had to give out some punishments for these very illegal contract negotiations.
The league decided on quite a few punishments for Joe Smith but mostly the Timberwolves franchise. The league fined the Timberwolves $3.5 million, the team had to forfeit their next five first-round draft picks (this was eventually changed and the league gave back the 2003 pick), Joe Smith’s contracts with the Timberwolves were voided, The owner of the Timberwolves, Glen Taylor, was suspended up to April 31, 2001, and finally, the vice president of basketball operations, Kevin McHale, was forced to take a leave of absence through July 31.
The most ridiculous thing of this whole debacle is that afterwards Kevin McHale denied having ever known of any illegal deals and said, “I haven’t read a contract in four or five years,” and he even added, “There are eight to 10 teams that do this all the time. They’re just good at it. We’re bad.” Of course you’re bad at it, especially since you took this ridiculous risk on a player that definitely should not have been the guy they even thought of taking a risk on.
This awful mistake of a deal made it so that the Timberwolves weren’t able to utilize very valuable picks that would have helped them build a good team around their star player. This is just one of the many heartbreaks that Minnesota sports fans have had to endure. Seeing how I am a huge fan of the NBA and plan to go into the media side of it in the future, I can tell you one thing for sure. I think about this deal at least once a week, and every time I get extremely mad at just how badly the Timberwolves messed up what could have been a great team.
Brennus Braaten is a Fillmore Central High School student, one of 10 area students participating in the Journal Writing Project, now in its 27th year.
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