Press conference scheduled for 1pm

Forward Kevin Love said in an early-morning posting on Twitter that McHale will not return as coach.

“Today is a sad day,” Love tweeted. “Kevin McHale will NOT be back as head coach next season.”


A person close to McHale confirmed later this morning that McHale is out.

The Wolves have called a 1 p.m. press conference at which new team president of basketball operations David Kahn will announce McHale’s departure. McHale will not attend.

David Kahn will have a 1 p.m. news conference to address the fact that McHale will not return.
Makes the timing of Bill Laimbeer’s resignation curious, doesn’t it? Also makes me wonder if Kahn isn’t going to dismantle the roster McHale constructed quicker than anyone thought.
Kevin McHale and the Minnesota Timberwolves have come to a mutual agreement that he will not return as coach next season.

A person with knowledge of the decision, speaking on condition of anonymity because an announcement had not been made, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that McHale and new boss David Kahn had decided that McHale’s time with the Timberwolves was up.
Love’s exact text back to me late last nght: “Damn you guys are fast…let’s just say I talked to mac tonight and we will leave it at that.”
Under the right circumstances, McHale wanted to return to coach a solid nucleus of young talent, including Al Jefferson(notes) and Kevin Love(notes).

“Kevin made it clear to [Kahn] that he wanted to speak his mind and be honest about what he thought about matters with team,” a league executive said Wednesday morning. “That’s who Kevin is. It doesn’t seem like Kahn was too interested in that.”
From RandBall:
Before we delve (in a later post, perhaps) into who the Wolves should go after, let’s step back a minute and think about how this story broke: a player who didn’t know it was a secret put it on Twitter a few minutes after midnight, so anyone who follows him (which we do) and happened to be on Twitter at that time (which we weren’t) were the first to get the news. Star Tribune Your Voices blogger Darren “Doogie” Wolfson, known around these parts mostly for his previous work at KFAN, was among the first (if not the first?) to weigh in on the subject at 2:07 a.m. this morning. It spread quickly to news outlets, and the AP had a story up in the wee hours of the morning. We heard about a Tweet by a text. By 8 a.m., the “news” almost felt old — even though it hasn’t even been officially confirmed by Kahn yet. There’s a 1 p.m. news conference scheduled for today, 13 hours after Love’s Tweet.
Love, the soon-to-be-second-year Minnesota Timberwolf, sent a message (sorry, we don’t use “tweet” as a verb here in Old Folks World) declaring that McHale would not be back as coach, and was filled with proper regret about it, as the two had been close.

This, of course, precedes the announcement from the team about McHale, which makes owner Glen Taylor and new general manager David Kahn look like, well, rubes. Sitting on an announcement about your coach’s imminent whacking is never a good idea, and now, here’s a new reason why.

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