Hunter And Garnett: The Marketing Angle

The parallels between the current situations of the Wolves and Twins are quite distinct. Here you have two retooling teams that are fueled by hugely promising waves of youth, but have been unable to hold the attention and interest of casual fans due to brutally bad on-field performance.

You can point to the bright future all you want, but that's a tough sell when your team has one of the worst records in the league. And while many want to point to personnel miscues in both of these stalled rebuilds, the truth is that uncontrollable injury issues have been largely to blame.

The Wolves are not as bad a team as their 13-43 record suggests, but losing Ricky Rubio, Nikola Pekovic and other key players for sizable chunks of the season left them depleted, relying on overmatched backups and teenagers. As a result, the Wolves have suffered through loss after loss, watching fan interest drain in the process.

That's a shame, because it has caused the incredibly encouraging performances from some young players -- most notably Andrew Wiggins -- to get overlooked. Somewhat quietly, Wiggins is enjoying one of the best seasons for a player his age in NBA history, but fans here in Minnesota have been so uninvested in the team that many haven't fully taken notice.

The arrival of Garnett certainly provides a jolt on the court; though, at this stage of his career, probably not one as substantial as the giddy TV crew on Wednesday night would have you believe. More importantly, he's bringing back the fans. Nostalgia and familiarity for KG prompted Wolves faithful to fill up Target Center for his first game back and will almost certainly lead to increased attendance the rest of the year.

While it's all well and good that those fans will get to watch KG do his thing for 20 minutes a night, the more important thing is that they'll get to watch players like Rubio, Wiggins, Zach LaVine and Shabazz Muhammad. KG isn't the future -- those guys are.

The same dynamic is in play for the Twins with the Hunter signing. While the organization is moving in the right direction, casual fans can't be blamed for their reluctance to buy in after a fourth straight 90-loss season. While the club hardly expected to contend last year, they did expect to offer more glimpses of the promising future. Unfortunately, having the seasons of their two best prospects completely derailed by injury threw a big wrench into what should have been a youth showcase summer.

The Twins still had young players like Danny Santana and Kennys Vargas break through, but those performances garnered reduced fanfare with the club posting its lowest attendance total since 2005.

A beloved and familiar face like Hunter, who people associate with the success of the mid-2000s, will help draw back some of the less hardcore fans that might not presently have kids like Byron Buxton and Miguel Sano on their radar.

I continue to believe that Hunter is a rather poor fit from a baseball perspective, but I'm coming around on the potential overall benefits of the move. It's more challenging for me to analyze anything from a business angle than strictly wins-and-losses, but the value of getting more fans in the seats -- and exposing those fans to what should hopefully be an exciting and productive group of young players -- is obvious.

With both the Hunter and Garnett additions, there was some initial backlash that perhaps too much was given up to acquire players who won't be around long and won't drastically improve the quality of their respective teams. But in the big picture, the Wolves gave up a guy in Thaddeus Young who wasn't going to be part of the long-term equation, and while the Twins paid heftily for Hunter, they gave up nothing but money and it's a one-year deal.

My initial reaction was that Hunter's "intangible" qualities were not enough to justify spending that much while surpassing other options who would have fit better as players, and I still believe his impact as a leader and mentor is being overblown to some extent, but seeing the response to Garnett's return does open my eyes a bit.

If a casual fan shuffled into Target Center on Wednesday because of the Garnett buzz and then watched Rubio deliver a gorgeous bounce pass to Wiggins, who

Hopefully the same can be true of a Twins fan who might be enticed to come to the ballpark to relive some Hunter nostalgia, only to be treated to a triple by Buxton, a prodigious home run by Oswaldo Arcia or a 10-strikeout game from Alex Meyer or Trevor May.

Bringing back past franchise fixtures -- who at least have a chance to contribute positively -- to help get fans invested in the young players that really matter. That's not so hard to figure.