Timberwolves – Page 68 – David Shama's Minnesota Sports Headliners

Battle for Fans Tight in Twin Cities

Posted on May 21, 2018May 21, 2018 by David Shama

On a gorgeous Sunday yesterday we got a reminder about our crowded sports marketplace. The Twins and United played outdoors, while the Lynx opened their season indoors at Target Center.

The Golden Gophers and our seven pro teams (add in the Saints, Timberwolves, Vikings and Wild) often butt heads on the same day. The winners are Minnesota sports fans who have a plethora of professional and Gopher teams to follow in a society that thrives on choices and variety in everything from autos to wieners.

This area’s sports smorgasbord is among the most diverse in the nation. We also rank at the top with our lineup of (mostly) modern venues: Allianz Field, CHS Field, Target Center, Target Field, TCF Bank Stadium, 3M Arena at Mariucci, U.S. Bank Stadium, Williams Arena and Xcel Energy Center.

Ask the business side leaders of Minneapolis-St. Paul teams how they view all the competition from one another, and then get ready for a politically correct answer. They will tell you how great it is to have a rich sports landscape and that all the teams can be successful financially. The stock answers will include how they cheer for each other and wish for success by all.

Kumbaya? Maybe.

Truth is, if you eliminated several of the teams, popularity and box office success would increase for at least some organizations. Last Sunday the Twins drew 28,577 fans and the Lynx attracted 13,002, according to the Star Tribune. Despite playing in spectacular weather against border rival Milwaukee, the Twins missed a sellout by about 10,000 customers. The Lynx, in a seaon opener celebrating last year’s WNBA title and playing a top team in the Sparks, had over 6,000 seats that went unsold. The United reported a sellout audience of 23,117 at its temporary home at TCF Bank Stadium.

At 3.5 million, this is one of the 20 largest metropolitan areas in the country and that large population helps to support all of our entertainment options, but imagine if neither the Twins, nor the Lynx, or United, had box office competition in the spring and summer. What if the Gophers didn’t have to battle the Vikings, Timberwolves and Wild for football, basketball and hockey customers?

Some operations get hurt in this crowded sports marketplace that includes a battle not just to sell tickets but also to generate revenues from suites, sponsorships, venue and broadcast advertisers, concessions and merchandising. Despite four WNBA titles in seven years, the Lynx work hard to sell tickets including in the playoffs. The Timberwolves and Gophers, even with infrequent successes, have histories of disappointing their fans. Support for these teams can be iffy and conditional.

You can add the Twins to that list. They and MLB also face the problems of inclement weather, lengthy games and slow pace of play.

The Vikings win any and all popularity contests here. With a winning team and fabulous venue in U.S. Bank Stadium, the Vikings can withstand any number of competitors for the sports dollar in this marketplace. The NFL, despite its infamous reputation for head trauma, remains at the top of the American sports kingdom including in Minneapolis.

The Wild has produced competitive teams but little to cheer about in the playoffs. The organization, though, excels at customer relations and is in sync with the rabid hockey market in Minnesota. Hockey fans have a special passion for their sport and the Wild has never seriously broken the bond with its fanbase.

It’s niche loyalty that serves the Saints, too. The local independent baseball franchise’s shtick has branded the Saints as entertainment first, winning second. Comedian Bill Murray is an owner and there seemingly is no end to the gimmicks in the organization’s marketing plan. The Saints do it right, including dividing up their CHS Field seat allotment into thirds for season tickets, groups and individual sales.

Saints games are family friendly and tickets inexpensive compared with many of the offerings in this market. Affordable pricing is part of the United’s strategy, also. The second-year Minnesota MLS franchise is aiming to fill its stadium with what executives see as an unfilled opportunity to satisfy the existing and growing soccer interest in the state.

Part of what’s fueled the population growth in this area is an increasing immigrant population. Many of those newcomers love the “world’s sport”—soccer. A lot of immigrants are young and like other Minnesota millennials have grown up playing soccer.

Millennials, though, are an elusive target for some sport marketers. Baseball, football and golf all want to score with millenials who have a reputation for short attention spans. Ask a millennial if he watched a Twins game, or even the Vikings, and a predictable answer is he opted for a 25-second video recap.

For now at least there isn’t any downsizing in this busy sports marketplace that includes the Minnesota Whitecaps, the women’s pro hockey franchise that has been around since 2004. Leaders announced last week the Whitecaps are joining the National Women’s Hockey League. That’s the highest level of American women’s professional hockey, so we’re big league in that, too.

Expansion of the sports menu appears likely with Minneapolis-St. Paul trading the 3M Championship senior golf tournament for a PGA Tour event starting in 2019. More competition for the sports dollar locally but another option for the consumer.

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Thibs-Musselman Easy Comparison

Posted on May 8, 2018May 8, 2018 by David Shama

Most everyone who follows hoops in this town knows Tom Thibodeau is a serious guy. I encountered him awhile back at a breakfast gathering and he told me about how he enjoys walking near a city lake. I got the impression that to Thibs this was the equivalent of spending a week at Disney World.

In Thib’s world it’s work and more work. As the Timberwolves head coach and president of basketball operations he carries a lot of weight on those 60-year-old shoulders. The public has heard about his hours devoted to film study and game preparation. Fans have witnessed and cringed at his barking from the sidelines on what seems like every possession of every game all winter long.

Despite taking the Timberwolves to the playoffs for the first time since 2004, there is a lot of angst surrounding Thibs. He has annoyed part of the fan base with his harsh courtside style, insistence on playing his starters max minutes and not winning enough games. He is faulted, too, for taking on two jobs as coach and top executive in the basketball department. Fuel was added to that criticism yesterday when the Pistons let Stan Van Gundy go, the only other man in the NBA holding two leadership jobs like Thibodeau. There is even speculation insiders in the Wolves organization are critical of their perceived grumpy leader.

All of this is kind of déjà vu to me. I knew Thibs’ mentor, Bill Musselman. It was Musselman who first gave Thibodeau an NBA job, hiring him as an assistant coach for the 1989 expansion Timberwolves. At that time Musselman was 49 and had already lived through a career where he both created and dodged minefields.

Basketball was war to Musselman. He might not win the war but he sure as hell was going to win plenty of battles and make his opponents pay a price. Every possession in every game was almost like life and death to him—maybe more important than that.

I met Musselman after he was named head coach of the Golden Gophers in 1971. At his opening day of practice that fall he and his players took the floor about 30 minutes later than scheduled. The reason, I later learned, was because the 30-year-old coach was giving the players a motivational talk that included war music.

Before that practice he also was hyping the “troops” about how they had to beat Ohio State, the Big Ten favorite, when the two teams met on the court in Minneapolis in January. No one knew back then the Gophers and Buckeyes would tangle in their infamous late game brawl on the Williams Arena floor.

Musselman was basketball wise and passionate but he also was emotionally immature, hypercompetitive, hot tempered and tough. Although he was less than 6-feet tall, Musselman gave the impression he might fight anybody, any time. He used to play basketball in the driveway of his Bloomington home with his assistant coaches and I heard a tale or two of fist fights over a dispute like who knocked the ball out of bounds.

Before the 1971 season Musselman promised fans the Gophers would win the Big Ten title, despite inheriting a program that hadn’t won a conference championship since 1937. The 1970-71 Minnesota team had a 5-9 league record and finished fifth in the standings.

Musselman added junior college players Ron Behagen, Bob Murphy, Bobby Nix and Clyde Turner to his first roster. They combined with others, including a walk-on named Dave Winfield, to produce an 11-3 conference champion with an 18-7 overall record.

Even suspensions of Behagen and Corky Taylor from the Ohio State showdown didn’t slow down the title drive. Musselman’s team relied on the “Iron Five” of starters to play most of the minutes each game (sounds familiar to Thibs followers) while using a troublesome matchup zone defense that held Big Ten opponents to 52 points or less six times from late January to season’s end.

Not only did the Gophers have talent and coaching but they owned a home court advantage that might have been the best in the country. When Musselman came to Minnesota from Ashland College, he brought with him a pregame warm-up featuring Harlem Globetrotters-like ball handling and other gimmicks. Set to contemporary music, the pregame show whipped up crowd enthusiasm and had Williams Arena rocking before the game even started. During the 1971-72 season the only home loss was to Ohio State, 50-44.

Musselman & Olberding (photo courtesy of Minnesota Athletic Communications)

Musselman often made Gopher basketball the hottest ticket in town during his four seasons as coach. His teams played defense and rebounded like their lives depended on it—and they probably did. He was hard on players (hello, Thibs) and sometimes they pushed back like when star freshman forward Mark Olberding, the man-child from Melrose, Minnesota threw a towel at the coach during a timeout.

Musselman’s obsession with winning eventually got him and the Gophers in trouble. After he left the Gophers to coach the ABA San Diego Sails, the NCAA charged Minnesota with over 100 rules violations. That was a sad ending to a career at Minnesota where he not only proved he could coach and win, but recruit, too, developing future pro players Behagen, Olberding, Mark Landsberger and Mychal Thompson. He also had a profound influence on Flip Saunders who was his point guard for two seasons before becoming a basketball legend in Minnesota as a coach and front office executive.

The Sails folded soon after Musselman arrived and so, too, did the ABA’s Virginia team he also coached. A seldom take no for an answer salesman, Musselman talked his way into the NBA Cavs organization in the 1980s and had a short stay as the team’s head coach. Anyone who knew Musselman, though, realized that wouldn’t end his coaching career.

Musselman was working on a string of minor league pro basketball coaching jobs before he became head coach of the Timberwolves in 1988. In the 1980s I was involved with promoting NBA exhibition games at the Met Center. During one of those years Musselman crashed a private reception before the game. My friend and uninvited guest knew of the rumors that Minneapolis might soon be home to an NBA expansion franchise and he was in town to find out what was happening, and maybe land a job as head coach.

Musselman’s mind was always turning with ideas. When he wasn’t working, he was often exercising to stay healthy. He almost treated sleep like a disease to be avoided. If you got a phone call at 11 p.m. you considered yourself lucky. Others might hear from him after midnight.

After owners Marv Wolfenson and Harvey Ratner paid the expansion fee for the Timberwolves, they were attracted to Musselman as their coach because of his work ethic and the popularity he built with the Gophers in the 1970s. In the Wolves’ first season of 1989-90 the club drew a crowd of 49,551 for Fan Appreciation Night in the Metrodome. Their total home season attendance was 1,072,572, an average of 26,160 per game.

Musselman wasn’t the easiest of souls to get along with during his two seasons of coaching the ragtag expansion Timberwolves. Musselman’s first club went 22-60, his second 29-53. Imagine the pain of that on a man once quoted as saying, “Defeat is worse than death because you have to live with defeat.”

On April 22, 1991 Musselman and his young assistant, Thibodeau, were fired by Wolfenson and Ratner. Musselman would go on to coach in college at South Alabama and serve as an NBA assistant with the Trailblazers before dying way too young at age 59.

For Thibodeau, being let go by the Timberwolves was just the beginning. He earned a reputation as one of the NBA’s best assistant coaches helping the Celtics to a championship. As head coach of the Bulls, his clubs were contenders and known for their defense and intensity.

Pau Gasol, a future hall of famer who played for Thibodeau with the Bulls, offered this perspective on the coach to Nick Friedell in a March 18. 2018, Espn.com story:

“I appreciated how devoted, how much he cared,” Gasol said of Thibodeau. “He brought a certain edge to every game. Sometimes it might have gotten, I won’t say out of hand, he’s just an intense person, right? We know that. But it comes, I think, from a place that he cares so much about what he does. He’s immersed into basketball, and he wants his team to perform.”

Take it from someone who knew Musselman, and knows Thibs. These cats are cut from similar cloth.

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U Basketball Ticket Sales Jump

Posted on April 22, 2018April 22, 2018 by David Shama

A Sunday notes column including Gopher news and Timberwolves analysis.

The University of Minnesota Athletic Department reported via email to Sports Headliners that as of last Wednesday morning 400 new public season tickets for women’s basketball have been sold since Lindsay Whalen was named head coach on April 12.

As part of a request for information from the University about season ticket sales, it was learned just 13 new tickets had been sold prior to the announcement about Whalen, the former Gopher player and legendary figure in the state. Her presence as the new leader of the program has generated more interest than in a long time.

For the 2017-18 season, 1,338 public season tickets were sold. The Athletic Department is in a renewal period now with existing season ticket holders. With combined renewals and new sales, it seems certain that with the enthusiasm for Whalen the 2018-19 public season ticket totals will exceed the 1,338 total.

Last season, according to figures provided by the Big Ten Conference as of March 27, the Gophers ranked 35th in attendance nationally with a per game average of 3,130 fans at Williams Arena (capacity 14,625.) Purdue, averaging 6,036, led the Big Ten and ranked eighth in the country.

Interest in Whalen and support for the Gophers could fade quickly next season if the team isn’t winning. Flip that scenario and Minnesota may have one of its best seasons ever at the box office.

Another opportunity for the Athletic Department to ride the Whalen momentum during the immediate months ahead is with donors. None of the women’s sports at Minnesota, including basketball, are profitable. The department also has a large debt remaining on the new $166 million Athletes Village.

John Anderson, coach of the No. 25 nationally ranked Gophers baseball team, speaks to the CORES lunch group May 10 at the Knights of Columbus Hall in Bloomington, 1114 American Blvd. Reservations need to be made by May 7. More information is available by contacting Jim Dotseth, dotsethj@comcast.net.

The Timberwolves earned their first playoff win against the Rockets last night because of several factors including being better at three-point shooting than the NBA’s most famous team for that skill. The Wolves made 15 of 27 attempts, 55.6 percent in their 121-105 victory. The Rockets were 15 of 41, 36.6 percent.

The Timberwolves, not known as a fast break team, outscored the Rockets 13 to 2 in that category to narrow Houston’s 2-1 lead in the best of-seven-game series.

Derrick Rose was a super sub last night, scoring 17 points in 21 minutes off the bench—more than any reserve on the Rockets. The Wolves were plus-17 when he was on the floor, best on the team after Jimmy Butler’s plus-19. Butler led Minnesota in scoring with 28 points.

Popular former Timberwolves point guard Ricky Rubio, who management here decided to move on from, had a triple double performance in Salt Lake City last night with 26 points, 11 rebounds and 10 assists as his Jazz went up 2-1 in its opening playoff series against the Thunder. Fans roared “Rubio!” during perhaps the greatest game of his career.

The 1976 Division III Saint John’s national champions will be honored with the Murray Warmath Legendary Team Award at the 11th annual Minnesota Football Honors Awards Event April 29 at U.S. Bank Stadium. Among the many other award winners will be St. Thomas alum and former Gopher athletic director Mark Dienhart who will receive the Bud Grant Distinguished Minnesotan Award. Minnesota Vikings award winners haven’t been announced.

Generation gap: Grant, who turns 91 next month, joined Star Tribune columnist Sid Hartman, 98, for lunch last week with new Vikings quarterback Kirk Cousins, 29.

Grant will hold another annual garage sale at his Bloomington home May 16-18.

New Gopher men’s basketball assistant coach Rob Jeter’s dad, the late Bob Jeter, was a great halfback at Iowa and was MVP in the 1959 Rose Bowl. Jeter played defensive back for the Green Bay Packers and coach Vince Lombardi in the 1960s.

The Vikings will select Texas offensive tackle Connor Williams with the 30th pick in the first round of Thursday night’s NFL Draft, according to the April 23 issue of Sports Illustrated. In its mock draft the magazine predicts the Browns, with the No. 1 overall choice, will choose Wyoming quarterback Josh Allen.

Wonder what Wild owner Craig Leipold is thinking after his team’s dismal first round playoff elimination in five games to the Jets? Injuries in 2017-18, including in the playoffs, were a problem, but before the season Leipold said anything short of winning the Stanley Cup would be a disappointment.

The Wild struggled offensively for much of the series and were shut out in the last two games. Wing Zach Parise led the club in goals with three even though he missed the last two games with a fractured sternum.

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