Flip Saunders may not coach in 2015-16, as he battles Hodgkin’s Lymphoma

In August, Minnesota Timberwolves head coach and president Flip Saunders was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, but the hopeful prognosis left him the ability to coach his team this season. In September, it was announced that he would have to take a leave of absence in order to fight the disease; with Timberwolves mainstay and assistant coach Sam Mitchell taking over as head coach on an interim basis.

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Now we’ve learned that, sadly, we might not get to see Saunders coach for the entirety of the 2015-16 season. From Jerry Zgoda at the Minnesota Star-Tribune:

When asked Friday if he expected Saunders to return to his jobs, Taylor paused and said: “Not this year. I just think his illness, I mean, it’s serious. At this point, if he came back I still think he’d have a hard time to recover all his energy and all that because he has been in the hospital for a long time.”

[…]

Taylor called the developments “an unbelievable situation we hadn’t anticipated going into this season” and said he talked with the team’s players about Saunders’ condition and his influence on all of them as coach, chief basketball decision-maker and franchise part-owner during a team dinner at Taylor’s Mankato home earlier this month.

“I don’t care how old you get or how experienced you get, these friendships that are in your lives are so important,” said Taylor, who has employed Saunders two different times and known him since shortly after he bought the team in 1994. “They do affect your heart and your mind on a daily basis.”

Saunders coached the Wolves from 1995 until 2004, making the playoffs in eight of the nine full seasons that he ran the squad. He returned to Minnesota in 2013 to work as team president, and took over coaching duties again in 2014.

The Wolves had the fewest wins in the NBA in 2014-15, as they punted disgruntled franchise star Kevin Love to Cleveland in exchange for, in essence, Rookie of the Year Andrew Wiggins prior to Wiggins’ first NBA game. The team earned the top overall pick Karl-Anthony Towns in the 2015 draft, adding him to a cadre of young talent that includes Wiggins, Ricky Rubio, Shabazz Muhammad, Zach LaVine, and Gorgui Dieng.

Saunders has a 654-592 record as an NBA coach, including post-Minnesota stops in Detroit and Washington.

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Selfishly, for NBA fans? It would be fantastic to see how Flip Saunders appropriated the offense that did such fantastic work for him in 2003-04 with the Timberwolves and in 2005-06 with the Detroit Pistons to the modern era. We were looking forward to see how he ran Karl-Anthony Towns. How he experimented with Andrew Wiggins in his second year. What his plans were with a healthy Ricky Rubio. It would have been great to see him and Kevin Garnett huddling on the sideline, yet again.

Get well, Flip Saunders. We’ll see you in 2016-17, and the NBA family cannot wait to see what you’re set to cook up with this young stable of Timberwolves talent.

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Kelly Dwyer is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @KDonhoops