Anthony Peeler

For six seasons, whenever the Garnett-era Timberwolves needed a jumper to fall or a perimeter fire to be put out, the ball found Anthony Peeler — and in the spring of 1998 he handed the franchise the first playoff wins it had ever known.

Vitals
Born	November 25, 1969, Kansas City, Missouri
College	Missouri (four seasons)
Drafted	No. 15 overall, 1992 (Los Angeles Lakers)
Acquired	Trade from Vancouver, February 18, 1998
Seasons as a Wolf	6 (1998–2003)
Number	1, later 44

The arrival. On February 18, 1998, Minnesota made one of the more bittersweet deals of its young history, shipping Doug West, an original Timberwolf drafted in 1989 and the longest-tenured player the franchise had ever employed, to the Vancouver Grizzlies for Peeler. A former No. 15 overall pick of the Lakers, Peeler had spent a season and a half exiled in Vancouver, where the year before he had dropped a career-high 40 points on New Jersey. Minnesota did not need another star; it needed shooting and toughness around a 21-year-old Kevin Garnett and Stephon Marbury. Peeler was exactly that: a broad-shouldered two-guard who could space the floor, defend, and, across 30 games down the stretch, average 13.0 points on a scorching 45 percent from three as the Wolves finished 45-37.

The heroics against Seattle. That spring the Wolves drew the second-seeded, 61-win SuperSonics of Gary Payton, Vin Baker and Detlef Schrempf in a best-of-five first round, and Minnesota had never so much as won a playoff game, having been swept by Houston a year earlier. Seattle buried them by 25 in Game 1. Then Peeler and Garnett flipped it: Minnesota stole Game 2 in Seattle, 98-93, the first postseason win in franchise history, and took Game 3 at Target Center, 98-90, with Peeler scoring 20, for a stunning 2-1 series lead. The Sonics steadied to win Games 4 and 5, but Peeler went out firing, pouring in 28 points on elimination night and leading all Wolves with a 16.2-point series average. It would be years before Minnesota finally won a playoff series, but the franchise’s first taste of postseason success wore Peeler’s fingerprints.

The steadying veteran. For the rest of his tenure Peeler was the archetypal Garnett-era role player: a reliable nine-to-13-point scorer who took a hard perimeter assignment and let it fly from deep, shooting better than 39 percent from three in four different Minnesota seasons. The Wolves made the playoffs in all six of his years and lost in the first round every single time, part of the franchise’s infamous run of seven straight opening-round exits, but Peeler was a fixture through the near-misses, the veteran floor-spacer next to a young MVP-in-waiting. He made 465 threes in a Minnesota uniform, still seventh in franchise history a generation later.

By the numbers

Regular-season stats, per Basketball-Reference:

Season	GP	PPG	RPG	APG	FG%	3P%
1997-98	30	13.0	3.4	3.8	.445	.453
1998-99	28	9.6	3.0	2.8	.379	.298
1999-00	82	9.8	2.8	2.4	.436	.333
2000-01	75	10.5	2.6	2.6	.421	.391
2001-02	82	9.0	2.5	2.2	.421	.392
2002-03	82	7.7	2.9	3.0	.414	.410

Wolves career totals

Franchise ranks

• 7th Made threes (465)
• 14th Steals (373)

Per the Timberwolves all-time made-threes and steals leaderboards.

Accolades

• Big Eight Player of the Year, 1992
• Consensus All-American, 1992
• 2× First Team All-Big Eight
• Big Eight Newcomer of the Year, 1989
• Missouri Sports Hall of Fame, 2018

Lore

The price of Shaq. Peeler’s road to Minnesota ran straight through one of the most consequential summers in NBA history. In July 1996 the Lakers traded Peeler and George Lynch to Vancouver for a second-round pick, a pure salary dump to clear cap room. That move, alongside the Vlade Divac deal that netted Kobe Bryant, freed the money Los Angeles used to sign Shaquille O’Neal. He spent a season and a half in the league’s coldest outpost before the trade that finally brought him to Target Center.

The first ones that counted. Before Garnett’s Wolves ever won a series, they had to win a game, and Games 2 and 3 of the 1998 Seattle series were the first two postseason victories in franchise history, full stop. Peeler was central to both, and his 28-point elimination game remains one of the great forgotten scoring nights of the era.

The elbow, from the wrong bench. Peeler’s most infamous Minnesota-adjacent moment came after he had left. In Game 6 of the 2004 Western Conference semifinals, the franchise’s greatest run and its march to a first conference finals, Peeler, by then a Sacramento King, was ejected for an elbow to the head of his old friend Garnett and drew a suspension that cost him the deciding Game 7 that Minnesota won. Six seasons as Garnett’s teammate, and their careers ended up crossing at the sharpest possible angle.

Mizzou royalty. Long before the pros, Peeler was one of the finest players in University of Missouri history: the 1992 Big Eight Player of the Year and a consensus All-American who left Columbia as the Tigers’ third-leading scorer with 1,970 points. He was inducted into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame in 2018.

He never made an All-Star team and the Wolves never escaped the first round on his watch, but Anthony Peeler was on the floor for the first playoff win this franchise ever earned — a sentence only a small handful of players will ever get to own.