ESPN wrote: The owner said he was going to make a change and he asked me if I'd do it. It wasn't ideal, but the owner's the owner. He said, 'Will you do it?' And I said, 'Yeah, I'll do the best I can with it.'"
Timberwolves coach Kevin McHale, doing little to dispel the idea that he was reluctantly convinced to leave the front office when asked if he had looked at the next 10 games on the Wolves' schedule before agreeing to replace Randy Wittman.
If he doesn't sound terribly geeked up about his new gig -- after losses to the Jazz, Nuggets, Lakers, Cavaliers, Rockets, Magic and Spurs (twice) in those first 10 outings -- bear in mind that he was speaking about an hour before the Wolves rolled up a 29-point lead in Dallas and then proceeded to let it all go in the worst single-game collapse in franchise history.
Having watched over the years how McHale interacts with players -- with respect coming back his way thanks to those three titles with the Celtics -- I believe he enjoys the coaching and teaching part of the game much more than you'd think. That's in spite of his lack of traditional coaching experience, which was hard to miss when the Mavs quickly sliced a 29-point deficit to nine points in a span of about six minutes, during which McHale made zero substitutions and settled for just one timeout.
The sense I get, though, is that McHale's well-chronicled aversion to travel is even more acute than he talks about. So even if the Wolves make a marked improvement during the second half of season, I'm struggling to picture McHale coaching this team beyond April.
Which brings us back to the big questions that owner Glen Taylor brushed off when Wittman was fired on Dec. 8: Will McHale be allowed to return to his front-office gig at season's end? Or will McHale and Taylor finally part ways for good if the Wolves don't pick it up dramatically?
If it's the latter, I still expect McHale to walk away with some sort of special adviser title because of McHale's longstanding association with Taylor and because Minnesota has been making decisions by committee for some time. We repeat: McHale is always likely to have Taylor's ear to some degree.
They also mentioned that the league office had downgraded Craig Smith's flagrant foul on Dirk nowitzki to a standard foul. Smith alleges he was just trying to swipe at the ball when he connected with Dirk's nose. McHale protested the flagrant at the time as well, and the referee shot back, "The ball ain't bleeding."
