Sam Amick

USA TODAY Sports

Of all the stops that Tom Thibodeau made on his sabbatical last year – 14 visits with 10 different teams and a trip to the Sloan Conference in Boston – Napa was the turning point.

The NBA’s most famous workaholic had become its most popular tourist, learning from organizations like the Golden State Warriors as a way to improve his mental database. But it was spring time in California’s most famous wine country, and Thibodeau – the yeller, the brooder, the maniacal man who felt so far from all that acrimony he had left behind in Chicago the year before – was too tranquil for his own good.

“When you’re relaxing and you’re in Napa in the middle of basketball season, and you’re like, ‘OK, this is just not normal; it was (surreal),” Thibodeau, who is single and without children, told USA TODAY Sports recently. “Last year was great for me, but what you do miss is you miss the camaraderie of being around a team with a group, with your staff. You miss the competition.”

Enough with the aging process, in other words. It’s time to stomp grapes again.

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Tall task ahead

To say Thibodeau’s new basketball life is different from the old one is like saying the Minnesota Timberwolves are a mildly interesting group. He is their new coach and president of basketball operations, a 58-year-old who has the sort of freedom and influence he never enjoyed with the Chicago Bulls, and has been tasked with putting an upstart team back on the map.

It has been 12 years since they made the playoffs (the NBA’s longest drought), one year since coach Flip Saunders died and put a hole in the organization’s collective heart, and six months since Thibodeau was given a five-year, $40 million deal to replace Sam Mitchell and help with healing. But the bliss that Thibodeau felt on that peaceful day in Napa has only swelled since, what with this halcyon landscape that lies before him.

This, perhaps more than any other job in the NBA land, is the stairway to hoops heaven.

The T’Wolves have a dynamic young core, wildly-talented sponges like big man Karl-Anthony Towns (projected future Hall of Famer), fellow No. 1 pick Andrew Wiggins (upside galore) and resident slam dunk champion Zach Lavine (who can shoot threes, too) who are learning to handle his hard-driving ways.

They have room to grow the roster: $10 million in salary cap space even after Thibodeau added depth by signing Brandon Rush, Cole Aldrich and Jordan Hill in the offseason, and the facilities that – in addition to the allure of playing with their young stars – should help attract free agents in the future (a $25 million practice facility that opened last season and $128.9 million in renovations scheduled for the Target Center to be done by next year).

Which says nothing of the off-court advantages that come with Thibodeau’s arrival.

Barring some sort of identity crisis, there won’t be any conflicts with management like in Chicago. Thibodeau calls the shots, but he brought longtime executive Scott Layden in from the San Antonio Spurs to join him as general manager.

The drastically-different media market has provided quite the culture shock, too, with Nielsen ranking Minnesota as the league’s 15th largest market based on population (Chicago is fifth). In Chicago – where Thibodeau went 255-139 in five seasons and reached the playoffs five times, the conference finals once and the semifinals twice – his daily duties included facing a writing corps of seven full-time Bulls scribes (four who travel to road games). In Minnesota, where he left a Harvard coaching job behind 27 years ago to start his NBA career under the late Bill Musselman when the franchise began, there are just four full-time writers (one who travels full time).

It’s been quite an adjustment for Thibodeau, who grew accustomed to the media microscope that came with the Bulls beat. So imagine his surprise earlier this month, when no local media members who don’t work for the T’Wolves joined the team on a four-game, eight-day preseason tour through Charlotte, Lincoln, Neb. (against the Denver Nuggets), Louisville, Ky. (vs. Miami), and Oklahoma City. All this so-called hype, he must have thought, and no one to talk to ...

The ironic part is that the Wolves are moving the needle nationally like never before.

Before the regular season even started, and before USA TODAY Sports came into town, ESPN, Yahoo! Sports, and Bleacher Report had all come through to chronicle the tale of this team that went 29-53 under Mitchell last season. The Washington Post’s Tim Bontemps predicted the Wolves, who play in the loaded Western Conference, will win 50 games. This Christmas, in another surefire sign that they’re playing with the big boys, the T’Wolves will be part of the league’s featured holiday lineup (vs. Oklahoma City) for the first time ever.

Don't get too far ahead

True to form, Thibodeau has no time for all this talk of his team being labeled the next big thing.

As he sits in his practice facility office discussing it – not far from the “Film Room” placard on the door that fits his persona, the spot where he knocked out a wall to double the space of his new work home, and the four-big-screen television setup that hangs next to his desk – Thibodeau pounds all the principles that he’s hoping will take them to the NBA’s promise land.

“The hype and stuff like that, I think that’s for you guys to talk about,” Thibodeau said. “For us, it’s to understand what we have to put into each and every day, and what goes into winning to make the commitment to improve. And if we’re doing everything the right way, if we’re practicing the right way, if we’re preparing the right way, if we’re studying the right way, I think good things will happen. And we’re trying to measure ourselves as to whether everything is being done at a championship caliber level, so if we’re doing that, I think we’ll continue to improve.

“I don’t want to put a lid on what we can do or can’t do. I think we’re young. We have pure hearts. We have to grow and mature, and I think that will happen. But we have to put the work into it each and every day.”

Besides, Thibodeau knows as well as anyone how labels can be misleading.

For all the talk of him as some sort of coaching cartoon – the booming voice, tall tales of him as a film rat, a penchant for pushing his players too hard, defensive mastermind – there’s a human side to Thibodeau that is plain to see at this point in his career. His sabbatical revealed that much.

Not only did Thibodeau reconnect on a personal level, visiting friends and family -- in a way he hadn’t since the NBA had a lockout four years ago -- by vacationing and making a habit out of afternoon cinema. He followed through on a belief that personal evolution and reflection are vital to one’s growth.

So he studied teams and their strengths and weaknesses, learning from others in much the same way that he wants his players to learn from him. There were two visits apiece with the Warriors, Boston Celtics, San Antonio Spurs and Oklahoma City Thunder, and one apiece with the Lakers, Utah Jazz, Detroit Pistons, Dallas Mavericks, and Houston Rockets.

“I’d try to view a bunch of teams that were in different stages of competing – some young, rebuilding teams, some that were in the middle, some that were championship caliber,” Thibodeau said. “I didn’t know what the next challenge would be, and I wanted to be prepared.

“I had an opportunity to talk to owners and general managers, head coaches, assistant coaches, scouts. It was a great way to just study, learn, get new ideas, and then at the end of the season to sit back and say, ‘These are the things that I’d really like to add.’”

New and improved, indeed. But with plenty of the vintage qualities.

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Thibodeau – who has surprised his players by granting unexpected days off, holding short shoot-a-rounds in the preseason (one was just 45 minutes) and even occasionally joking with them by pretending to yell only to smile when they sweat – has hardly strayed from his diligent ways. While some coaches keep a fluid practice schedule throughout the season, his is already mapped out from now until April (though he reserves the right to change based on team needs). It’s the same old scene on the sideline, too: Thibodeau pacing back and forth, hands on his hips, R-rated feedback being bellowed every so often when his players falter or an official draws his ire.

His attention to detail, even more than his legendary intensity, has struck Towns in their early days together.

“I just think it’s how technical he is with every single thing,” Towns told USA TODAY Sports. “I mean literally (if you’re) a foot off, then it’s a wrong rep for him (in practice), so it’s amazing the technicality he puts behind it – not only the defense, but offensively.”

“(As far as his intensity), I went to Kentucky. I had Coach (John) Calipari. I’ve always had that (sort of thing). He’s four times worse with that kind of message, so you just listen.”

Recapturing magic

Try as Thibodeau might to manage the lofty expectations, there’s nothing he wants more than to generate the kind of excitement he saw here when the franchise was born.

In that inaugural season of 1989-90, when Bill Musselman’s expansion squad was led by the likes of Tony Campbell, Tyrone Corbin and Pooh Richardson, the T’wolves set a season record for attendance that still stands (1,072,572). The final three regular-season games at the Metrodome were the stuff of local legend, drawing more than 40,000 for each game.

“We had 45,000, 47,000, and 49,000 (fans),” Thibodeau remembers. “And we were a 22-win team.”

Contrast that against the Wolves’ attendance mark last season – second-worst in the league at 14,175 – and it’s easy to see why Thibodeau left the vineyards to head for the Land of 10,000 Lakes.

“There’s a lot of work to be done,” Thibodeau said. “We were 12 games out of an eighth spot last year, so we know that we have to commit to our improvement, we have to put the work in to it each and every day, and I think we have a willing group. We have some really good young players that are hungry to win, but there’s a price that we have to pay and we have to learn and grow.”