Minnesota Timberwolves

The Minnesota Timberwolves (often referred to as the Wolves or T-Wolves) are an American professional basketball team based in Minneapolis. The Timberwolves compete in the National Basketball Association (NBA) as a member of the Northwest Division of the Western Conference. The team was founded during the league expansion in 1989 and has played its home games at Target Center since 1990. In 2025, longtime owner Glen Taylor completed the sale of the team to former MLB star Alex Rodriguez and his business partner Marc Lore, finalizing an agreement that began in 2021. In June 2025, the NBA Board of Governors unanimously signed off on the sale. Alex Rodriguez, Marc Lore, and a consortium of unnamed limited partners purchased the franchise for $1.5 billion.

Like most expansion teams, the Timberwolves struggled in their early years, contributing to their having the lowest win percentage of all active NBA teams. But after acquiring Kevin Garnett in the 1995 NBA draft, the team qualified for the playoffs in eight consecutive seasons from 1997 to 2004. Despite losing in the first round in their first seven attempts, the Timberwolves won their first division championship in 2004 and advanced to the Western Conference Finals that same season. Garnett was also named the NBA Most Valuable Player for that season. The team then went into rebuilding mode for more than a decade after missing the postseason in 2005, and trading Garnett to the Boston Celtics in 2007. Garnett returned to the Timberwolves in a February 2015 trade and finished his career there, retiring in the 2016 off-season. The Timberwolves ended a 14-year playoff drought when they returned to the postseason in 2018.