Time to talk a little wolves now with the athletics expert on all things Minnesota, but particularly the wolves at John Krasinski how you doing?

Doing really well. Good to be back. I was in your fair town actually for less than 24 hours so I didn't have time to say hi, but I did have some pretty good pizza at young Joni, which I understand is one of the better places in Minnesota.

That's one of the best we have absolutely so you picked right you had the right guidance whoever got you there. So no, I need to spend some more time there.

It was my sister by the way who works with this great restaurant in Chicago called Galete and is and she she knows like the best restaurants in every city.

She's like really deep in the restaurant industry, but yeah, I got to spend a little more time there at some point preferably during the summer because I'm told that like the food scene there is fantastic.

It is like people do underrated. They kind of everyone who hasn't been here imagines the Twin Cities and Minneapolis in particular to be like off from Star Wars, you know, just this frozen outpost and look it gets really cold here, but everyone who comes here and spends a little time is like, oh, you know, this is pretty nice because great theater and awesome food like it is there. There's a bunch of very eclectic hot food.

I end restaurants and and even just like middle of the road restaurants that are out of this world. So people are always surprised by it, but I'm always happy to give people the tour of it when they come just to open their eyes a little bit to what we have to offer here outside of ice and snow.

So is that why Gerson Rossis decided to take this wolves president basketball operations job.

I think so, although from what I understand one of his early meals that he had here was some home cooking from Glen Taylor, the owner's wife Becky in Mancato at their house.

So that was the meal that closed the deal for the Rosas. So I don't know. He's always said he's told me that he's a foodie and that he wants to get after these these great restaurants and stuff, but I think that there were a few other factors that may have just been there.

So I think that he's been a little bit higher on his list when he was looking at you know who why to come here, why not to.

Yeah, it was an interesting GM search. They had some candidates Michael Winger among them who ended up not even interviewing, but it did seem like Rosas at least had the wolves ahead of the wizards because he kind of did this interview when the wolves thing was was all but wrapped up.

What was your impression of the GM search and in particular as are related to some of the past searches that they've had.

Yeah, it's been it was really unique, especially to what the Timberwolves have normally done, but I think really kind of unique around the league as well when you kind of examine some of the ways and processes behind searching for for these jobs and look, it's it's a difficult thing to do to find the right person.

To run an organization you can make mistakes in the past typically Glen Taylor the owner has has been a little more unilateral in the way that he's operated with with these searches, you know he hired flips on his because he knew flips on his and he was comfortable.

He's always been kind of a guy who prefers to have a working relationship and a personal relationship with those who who work for him, both as a coach and as a as a big time executive.

So he hired Kevin MacKale because he was a local guy that he got to know back in the day, but I think after flip passed away, Glen was sort of encouraged to go outside of the box and not to just bring in someone who we knew who was in the country club as kind of is derisively referred to around here.

And so he hired a search firm to conduct the search for Tom Thibode and he obviously did not like how that process played out. He didn't really trust a search firm to to execute another search after getting someone that was just was a poor fit for what the way the timber wills are run when they brought in Tom Thibode.

Yeah, it seemed like there's a struggle with Thibode and Taylor just from a personal standpoint.

And so, I mean, you know, in in in fairness to Thibode, you know, he came in here and he was exactly who he is like I mean, it didn't.

Yeah, it shouldn't have surprised him when he was the same guy who was in Chicago.

Correct. Yeah, exactly. But I think the search firm did a poor job of identifying qualities that that would have appealed to Glen Taylor as much as just looking for someone to be a headliner and say, hey, look, we got Tom Thibode to Minnesota.

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