Editor’s note: The Athletic sat down recently with Timberwolves and Lynx owner Glen Taylor for a wide-ranging interview. Here is the second of the two-part series on the conversation. Part I can be found here.
NORTH MANKATO, Minn. — Glen Taylor shows a visitor into his spacious office and proudly points to a glass statue resting on a table.
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Dated Sept. 28, 2017, it thanks the Timberwolves owner for “exemplary service” as the chairman of the NBA’s board of governors during two terms — 2008-12 and 2014-17.
Taylor was succeeded by Toronto’s Larry Tanenbaum at the latest board meeting in October, bringing to an end nearly a decade of leadership that came during a period of significant growth and change for the league.
Taylor’s position had him in the center of two labor negotiations, the change in power from Commissioner David Stern to Adam Silver, the ouster of Clippers owner Donald Sterling and dawning of a new era of the NBA flush with TV money and infiltrated by a new breed of owners who have had to pay enormous price tags to get into an exclusive club.
For a former state senator from small-town Minnesota who owns a franchise that has been one of the league’s bottom-feeders for years, Taylor managed to ascend to an uncommon level of influence in a league that has more and more become populated with profit-hungry owners from the financial sector.
“It goes back to the days that I played sports and I always wanted to be the captain. Why would you not want to be the captain?” Taylor told The Athletic with a hearty chuckle. “I want to select who is on my team.”
The NBA chairman of the board is typically a short-term appointment. But Taylor came to the forefront during a period of sweeping change, and the trust he earned with Stern and Silver helped keep him there for the long term.
For all intents and purposes, Taylor served as the leader of the group continuously for all nine of those years. In 2012, Taylor was replaced by San Antonio Spurs owner Peter Holt. But Holt had other obligations that kept him from being able to fulfill the duties, so Taylor stepped back in.
With a down-home conversation style that can be disarming to millionaire players and billionaire owners alike, the 76-year-old Taylor was the man in the middle of some epic confrontations during his time at the top.
The lockout
During the tense negotiations of the lockout in 2011, Taylor was positioned between the hardline hawks who wanted to take the players for all they were worth and the doves who didn’t want to risk completely destroying their relationships with the most marketable athletes in the United States.
Before the real talks with the union began, Taylor said the owners decided to position him as the one who would step in during the critical moments to try to bring both sides together.
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When Stern and Billy Hunter would go toe-to-toe, when Hornets owner Michael Jordan drew a hard line, when players were ready to walk out of the talks altogether, Taylor would step in to try to keep things going.
“Instead of saying, ‘You’re wrong, that’s a dumb idea,’ or something like that, you listen to them,” he said. “And you say, ‘You’re being very practical here, but how do we solve it?’”
It wasn’t always successful. The lockout caused the 2011-12 season to be shortened to 66 games and to this day owners are still trying to find the right formula for sharing revenue to balance the scales between the big-city teams and smaller markets.
Things went much smoother last year when the two sides were able to come to agreement on a new deal without a labor stoppage.
“In any negotiation, speaking from the owners’ viewpoint, you don’t get what you set out to get,” he said. “You get some of the things, compromise a bunch of others and some you just leave on the table.
“I think it made the league better and stronger. I think both negotiations have done that. That was a positive for players and owners.”
Ousting Sterling
As chairman, Taylor also played a prominent role in ousting Sterling after some racist comments were made public in 2014. Taylor’s ability to connect played against him in this situation as Sterling came to him on multiple occasions asking for help.
“I think that you had an owner that this has been his life and certainly didn’t want to go out this way talking to you directly and asking for your help,” Taylor said. “It was that personal stuff that I had to deal with and eventually just say, ‘Donald, this is going to happen. Your team will be sold and you will be out.’
“To say that to him a number of times and have him call back looking for ways to keep a small ownership (was awkward). It just had to happen.”
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The Clippers were sold to Steve Ballmer that summer.
Not over yet
Taylor may have ceded the chairman’s role to Tanenbaum, but there is still plenty of work to be done.
The owners are still working on a more permanent solution to the revenue sharing issue, and Taylor certainly has a big stake in the situation. He just signed Andrew Wiggins to a five-year, $148 million contract. He will likely do the same next summer with Karl-Anthony Towns and will have to do so with Jimmy Butler in two years.
Situated in a smaller market with a team that has not made the playoffs since 2004, Taylor will need some significant revenue sharing from teams like the Knicks and Lakers to absorb the skyrocketing roster costs.
Taylor says he expects a vote to take place sometime in the next year that will include some changes to the current formula, but nothing significant.
“There is a difference of opinion. Mine, personally, is that we have set up a formula that has been very helpful that we have to continue to look at it,” he said. “You can always modify it and make it a little better. There are some areas that aren’t working quite right, and you just try to keep improving it to make it better.”
Changing face
One of the biggest changes between the league now and the one Taylor entered as an owner in 1994 is the kind of owner, or owners, that run franchises.
Taylor paid $88 million to buy the Wolves back then, a relative pittance compared to the $2 billion Ballmer paid for the Clippers. The price tag requires owners with incredible net worth, and more have looked to get into the league as an investment rather than a shiny toy to play with.
“Now so many owners come from a financial background where maybe lots of money is moved quickly,” Taylor said. “Fortunes are made quicker than in the old days when maybe it took longer to get there. I see that. I don’t know that I see that as bad or good, it’s just different and you have to accommodate their opinions.”
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That means Taylor’s ability to bring people together may be needed now more than ever.
“In a village, you’re sort of raised by the village, and you had to get along with everybody if you wanted to be a person people listened to,” he said. “You had to watch who they listened to. It wasn’t always the person that spoke the loudest or the most. But it was the person maybe who listened. That’s a quality that we’re missing a lot of times, of listening.”
(Top image credit: Jesse D. Garrabrant/NBAE via Getty Images)
