MINNEAPOLIS—When Ryan Saunders was a little boy, his mother predicted he’d follow one of two career paths: basketball coach or preacher. The first made sense: Ryan's father, Flip, was a former college guard who was an assistant at his alma mater, Minnesota, when his eldest son was born in 1986. From there, he had a two-season stint as an assistant at Tulsa before spending seven seasons as a head coach in the CBA.
In 1995, when Saunders was nine, his father got the job that would define his career: head coach of the Minnesota Timberwolves, a struggling team that had just drafted a skinny teenager out of Chicago named Kevin Garnett.