Flip Saunders

No one has ever meant more to the Minnesota Timberwolves’ bench than Flip Saunders, and no one has ever stayed longer.

Vitals
Born	February 23, 1955, Cleveland, Ohio
College	Minnesota (1977)
Timberwolves tenures	Head coach 1995–2005, 2014–15; president of basketball ops 2013–2015
Coaching record (MIN)	427–392
Playoff berths	8 (1997–2004)
Died	October 25, 2015 (age 60)

Building from nothing. Saunders took over a young expansion club on December 18, 1995, moving to the bench from the GM’s chair he’d held since that May under his old college teammate Kevin McHale, then the team’s vice president. The roster’s one real asset was a teenager the two had just gambled a lottery pick on straight out of high school: Kevin Garnett. What followed was the most sustained success the franchise had known. Minnesota reached the playoffs for the first time in 1997, posted its first winning season in 1997-98, and cleared 50 wins in 1999-2000 and 2001-02. The pattern was punishing: seven straight first-round exits. The postseason became an annual appointment with heartbreak, the Wolves arriving every spring and going no further.

The 2004 breakthrough. Then came the season that still stands alone. Flanked by Sam Cassell and Latrell Sprewell, Garnett won MVP and Saunders coached the 2003-04 team to 58 wins and the only division title in team history, finally leading them out of the first round. The Wolves beat Denver and Sacramento before falling to Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O’Neal and the Lakers in a six-game Western Conference Finals. It remained the deepest the franchise had ever gone until those back-to-back WCF trips in 2024 and 2025. The spell did not survive the following winter. With the team sliding toward the lottery, Saunders was fired on February 12, 2005, closing a first tenure worth 411 wins.

The wilderness years. He did not stay idle. In Detroit he inherited a title-tested roster and won 64 games in 2005-06, then made three straight trips to the Eastern Conference Finals across 176 wins in three seasons. A rockier stint in Washington followed, where a rebuilding roster went 51-130 and Saunders was let go in January 2012. But Minnesota was never far from his mind, and the Wolves, as it turned out, were not done with him.

Coming home. On May 3, 2013 the Wolves brought Saunders back as president of basketball operations, handing him a minority ownership stake and a team that had missed the playoffs every year since he left. When Rick Adelman retired in the spring of 2014, Saunders hired himself, stacking the bench atop the front office. His fingerprints on the modern team are everywhere. He traded Kevin Love to Cleveland in the summer of 2014 for Andrew Wiggins, the previous draft’s No. 1 pick. In June 2015 he spent the top selection on Kentucky big man Karl-Anthony Towns, calling it a “no-brainer.” The 2014-15 season was a 16-66 slog — he wasn’t building for that year, he was stocking the shelves for the next decade.

By the numbers

Season-by-season with Minnesota, per Basketball-Reference. The 1995-96 and 2004-05 lines cover only the games he coached; across 17 seasons everywhere he went 654-592:

Season	W	L	Win%
1995-96	20	42	.323
1996-97	40	42	.488
1997-98	45	37	.549
1998-99	25	25	.500
1999-00	50	32	.610
2000-01	47	35	.573
2001-02	50	32	.610
2002-03	51	31	.622
2003-04	58	24	.707
2004-05	25	26	.490
2014-15	16	66	.195

Wolves career totals

Franchise ranks

• 1st Coaching wins (427)
• 1st Games coached (819)
• 1st Playoff appearances (8)
• 1st Seasons coached (11)

Per the all-time franchise coaching leaderboard.

Accolades

• Winningest head coach in Timberwolves history (427 wins)
• 2003-04 Midwest Division title & Western Conference Finals (58–24)
• Led the franchise to its first eight playoff berths (1997–2004)
• 2× NBA All-Star Game head coach (2004, 2006)
• As president of basketball ops, drafted Karl-Anthony Towns No. 1 (2015) and acquired Andrew Wiggins
• Longest-tenured coach in franchise history

Lore

“Forever in my heart.” No relationship defined Saunders like the one with Garnett, whom he coached from an 18-year-old rookie to Most Valuable Player. Part of his front-office vision was a reunion, and in February 2015 he brought the aging Garnett back to Minnesota to mentor the kids he was drafting. When Saunders died, Garnett posted a photograph of himself sitting alone before his coach’s empty parking space at the practice facility, captioned simply, “Forever in my heart …” Garnett would later say a three-minute tribute video could not hold a lifetime of friendship, and that his coach “wasn’t celebrated the proper way,” a grief that hardened into a lasting rift with ownership. The bond itself was never in doubt.

The salesman. Those who played for Saunders remembered a relentless optimist as much as a tactician. He brought hypnotists to training camp, loaded playbooks onto iPods, minted “Game Changer” coins, and never stopped trying to make a room believe. He was funny in a dry, patient way. Explaining a career of late-night minor-league dealing, he once observed that “if you get a coach after six beers at 4 a.m. in Cedar Rapids, they will trade you something.” He cast a rebuild as a matter of patience rather than luck: “You say luck, and maybe I say patience.” He was, by his own cheerful admission, nearly addicted to Mountain Dew, three cans a day before he finally quit.

The last team he built. Saunders announced in August 2015 that he was being treated for Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which doctors called treatable and curable. A September setback put him in the hospital and cost him the season, with assistant Sam Mitchell taking the bench. He died on October 25, 2015, at 60. The young team he assembled carried him into the year that followed: the Wolves opened 2-0 on the road, Towns logged double-doubles in each of his first two games, and the franchise ran a tribute video before a tearful home opener against Portland. Wiggins and Towns both grew into All-Stars. Their coach never got to watch it happen.

The name lives on. The Saunders story did not end on that bench. His son Ryan, a Minnesota kid who grew up around the team and rose through the staff as an assistant, was named interim head coach in January 2019, then given the permanent job that spring at 33, the youngest head coach in the NBA. His two-plus seasons ended with a dismissal in February 2021, yet the family’s championship arrived anyway: Ryan won an NBA title as an assistant with the Denver Nuggets in 2023. The Saunders name, first stitched into the Timberwolves in 1995, still runs through everything the franchise became.

Every Wolves coach since has been chasing his 427 wins.