Perspectives: Final Four recalls basketball law in Minnesota.

Byline: Marshall H. Tanick

"Teamwork is the beauty of our sport, where you have five acting as one."

Duke Coach Mike Kryzewski, two-time Final Four winner in Minneapolis

The men's collegiate basketball Division I championship round at the U. S. Bank stadium in downtown Minneapolis Saturday-Monday, April 6-8, is the latest high-profile sporting event to be played here, following the All-Star baseball game in 2014, Super Bowl LII last winter, and the college hockey Frozen Four title games at the Xcel Center in St. Paul a couple of months later, among a myriad of other recreational pursuits ranging from WWE wrestling to the offbeat X Games.

The collegiate Final Four is making its third appearance here at a third site, with previous events staged at Williams Arena on the University of Minnesota campus and a pair at the much more capacious Metrodome. The collegiate women's version of the Final Four adds another venue, the Target Center, where it will return to in 2022.

The two semi-finals on Saturday and the title game two nights later have been accompanied by the usual hoopla surrounding those spectacles these days, from music concerts to charity events. While bringing greater attention to the area, along with an estimated $142 million in revenue, barely 40 percent of the $370 million reportedly coming from Super Bowl spending in 2018, the Final Four also evokes flashbacks to the rich lore of basketball in this state, which has extended from the hard courts to the judicial ones.

Timberwolves travails

The Minnesota Timberwolves, concluding three decades of professional play here in the National Basketball Association (NBA), have had their occasional triumphs and more frequent setbacks on the courts and travails in the courtrooms.

Long before its first tipoff in the fall of 1989, the team was involved in litigation. The site of the Timberwolves' new home, near the warehouse district in downtown Minneapolis, was at the center of a landlord-tenant dispute in Wong Kong Harm Wun Sun Assoc. v. Chin, 1988 WL 33169 (Minn. App. 1988)(unpublished). The owner of the premises leased a building in 1986 for three years, requiring the tenant to make certain improvements along with paying real estate taxes and utilities. The landlord then gave the Timberwolves and option to purchase the property. The purchase option required that the landlord terminate the lease with the tenant in midterm.

The landlord secured an eviction against the tenant by default when the tenant inadvertently showed up an hour late for a court hearing in an unlawful detainer action. The appellate court reversed the trial court's refusal to vacate the default. The appellate court reasoned that the tenant had satisfied the four conditions necessary to reopen a judgement under Rule 60 of the Minnesota Rules of Civil Procedure: a reasonable defense on the merits, reasonable excuse for the default, exercise of due diligence after notice of the default, and absence of substantial prejudice to the other side.

The Timberwolves ultimately purchased the property and razed it to construct the arena (and health club) where the team has been playing following the team's inaugural season in the Metrodome.

But within a few years, the club was floundering on the court and at the box office, leading to an attempt to sell the team to a group out of New Orleans, after the city lost its initial NBA team, the Jazz, to Utah.

Dueling lawsuits sprung up here and in New Orleans to halt or facilitate the transfer. U. S. District Court Judge James Rosenbaum here enjoined the proposed move, which the Eight Circuit affirmed in National Basketball Ass'n. v. Minnesota Professional Basketball, Ltd. Partnership, 56 F.3d 866 (8th Cir. 1995). It held that the judge's injunction of a parallel Louisiana state court ruling barring the federal lawsuit properly fell...