This is off the media beat, but longtime readers know I’m a Timberwolves fan (yeah, I know) and write a “Where are they now?” column for the club’s season ticketholder magazine.

So when Wolves forward Mark Madsen Twittered “Will my boss Kevin McHale be back next year? Here are my thoughts,” I eagerly clicked through. The tale was worth it in a way I didn’t see coming …

Writes Madsen:

Here is one of the reasons why I want Kevin McHale to return as the head coach of the Timberwolves:

About a week ago, the NBA allowed all of us players to take part in a “Go Green” campaign to help promote great issues like environmental awareness, recycling, and other types of “green thinking” issues. Of course it’s a great opportunity and every team around the NBA wore warm-ups for one week with a big recycling logo on the front. Undoubtedly we have to take care of the environment in many many different ways.

Well, the first game we wore these special warm-up tops was against the Utah Jazz in Utah. After we had our 1-2-3- “Win” chant which was an event in itself that night, McHale held everybody up for one more minute and said something along the lines of,

“Hey fellas….I just want you to know about this global warming thing…..25 years ago it was Global Cooling and they were telling us we were going to freeze to death….so when they tell you all about global warming don’t worry about it too much…….”

Everyone was laughing so hard and it kind of loosened everybody up. We went out that night and took it to the Utah Jazz and won the game with a shorthanded roster.

Hey, those Michele Bachmann impressions crack everyone up! Except McHale was serious.

Madsen continues …

Then a week later I walked into a breakfast meeting in San Francisco when we were playing the warriors and the first thing I hear is Kevin McHale explaining to a couple of guys on the team, “Yeah…the ice cap off of Greenland is receding but the ice caps off Antarctica are actually expanding…

Now, even though I think global warming is real, McHale’s no Bachmann, so I view this mostly with bemusement. He has a right to his opinion, and as Madsen notes, it’s good that McHale cares about public affairs. Plus, he’s funnier than Dennis Miller!

McHale’s politics shouldn’t be a surprise; his wife Lynn is a Republican volunteer and Mitt Romney donor, so it makes sense global warming is viewed dimly in the McHale household. (I do wonder if the woods and birds are changing around their Hibbing cabin.) Hell, ex-GOP officeholder Glen Taylor is a big party donor, though I don’t know his global warming stance. Maybe this explains a bit of Taylor’s loyalty (thus far) to the perennially embattled icon.

Still, if McHale returns and you see the next year’s team looking extra confident coming down the tunnel, check for tea bags.