Nobody could have known at the moment. But nearly 20 years later, the year 2004 has become a seminal time in Minnesota sports history. The Vikings were an uninspiring 8-8 in the middle of the Mike Tice era, but Daunte Culpepper was rolling at the apex of his career. The Wild were going through the growing pains of a young franchise with the lockout looming. The Lynx hadn’t quite found their championship juice, and the Gopher Women’s basketball team made its exciting run to the final four led by Lindsay Whalen and Janel McCarville.
But those aren’t the teams we’re here to talk about. We’re here to talk about the Twins and the Timberwolves, and the last time we felt true joy watching either of these franchises nearly two decades ago.
In 2004, the Twins were in the middle of their resurgence under Ron Gardenhire. Gardy took a dormant franchise that hadn’t been to the playoffs since winning the World Series in 1991 to three straight division titles. But 2004 has the dubious honor of being the last time the Twins won a playoff game. What started as a rag-tag group of underdogs who beat the Moneyball Oakland A’s and were easy to root for turned into a cursed franchise that could never beat the New York Yankees. The Twins lost 18 straight playoff games and will always have a black mark over the careers of fan favorites like Joe Mauer, Justin Morneau, and anyone who put on a Twins jersey over the last 19 seasons.
That same curse seems to have crossed the street into the Target Center. In 2004, the Timberwolves were a team on the rise under the tutelage of Flip Saunders. They had an MVP season from Kevin Garnett who led the Wolves alongside Sam Cassell and Latrell Sprewell led to within two wins of the NBA Finals. It seemed like the Wolves were set up for sustained success for years to come. Fast forward 19 years, and the Timberwolves have endured one of the darkest periods for any franchise in the history of professional sports. They’ve gone through countless rebuilds, only made the playoffs just three times. They have yet to win a playoff series since the 2004 Western Conference Semifinals, when they beat the Sacramento Kings in seven games.
An entire generation of Minnesota sports fans has grown up without seeing the Twins win a playoff game or the Wolves win a playoff series. Half of that streak ended on Tuesday when the Twins beat the Toronto Blue Jays 3-1 in Game 1 of the AL Wild Card Series for their first playoff win since Game 1 of the ALDS against the Yankees in 2004. Charlie Walton’s lifetime-long nightmare of not seeing his teams win in the playoffs is finally half over. The Twins went on to win the best of three series and will face the Houston Astros in the divisional round. Now it’s Minnesota’s turn to break their streak and win their first playoff series in 20 years.
It’s been tough sledding each time they’ve made the playoffs since 2004. In 2018, the top-seeded Houston Rockets dropped 50 points in a quarter on the eighth-seeded Timberwolves and blew them out of the first round with relative ease. Four years later, the seventh-seeded Wolves pushed the second-seeded Memphis Grizzlies to six games but bowed out in the first round again. The Wolves blew multiple leads in that series and easily could have flipped things around and won 4-2. Last season, they lost 4-1 to the eventual champion Denver Nuggets, the top seed in the West. This summer, Bruce Brown admitted that the Timberwolves gave the Nuggets the hardest time in their title run.
If you watched the Minnesota’s preseason opener against the Mavericks on Thursday, you know this team is headed for the first-ever 82-0 regular season and the first NBA championship in franchise history. This is one of the deepest teams in Wolves history and should improve on a slightly disappointing 42-win total last season. Anthony Edwards is a star and his cadre of wingmen should be enough for the Wolves to compete in the Wild West this season. But the key for the Wolves to end the streak lies in the regular season.
The three times the Wolves have made the playoffs since they were the top overall seed in 2004, they were the eighth seed in 2018, seventh seed in 2022, and eighth seed last year. It is damn near impossible for a bottom seed to knock off a top seed in the NBA. An eighth seed has only knocked off the top seed six times in NBA history. The most recent example was the Miami Heat taking down the Milwaukee Bucks last year.
To end the streak, it’s imperative that the Wolves can get a top-four seed and home-court advantage. Last season, three games was the difference between fourth place and home-court advantage in the first round and an early exit as an eighth-seed. There are more questions than answers in the Western Conference. The only certainty is that Denver is good, and 45 wins seems within reach for one of the teams that Adam Silver said has the most star power. The Twins had home-field advantage against the Blue Jays, and look what happened to them. Nothing bad ever happens in Minnesota.
If 2004 was the beginning of the dark times for the Twins and Timberwolves, 2023-24 could be a turning point in the trajectory of these two franchises. The Twins opened the door. If all goes to plan Anthony Edwards and the Wolves will smash it in, and we’ll get to hang a second-round banner next fall.
