One more try.

If you’re in the market for Kevin Garnett, that’s all you need to know right now: The T’wolves are giving it one more try. And that statement applies just as well to their beleaguered general manager.

Minnesota signaled its intent very clearly on Tuesday when it announced the signing of free-agent guard Mike James, a 31-year-old sharpshooter coming off a career-best 20.3 points per game season with Toronto. In a thin free-agent market, the T’wolves won a heated bidding war with Dallas and Houston by positioning themselves as the only club willing to give James four guaranteed years for the midlevel exception.

Obviously, giving a long-term deal to a veteran guard isn’t the kind of move a team considers when it’s about to fold its cards, and that in and of itself is newsworthy.

The league has been rife with rumors that Minnesota might jettison its meal ticket after a disappointing 33–49 campaign, the culmination of years of harebrained moves by GM Kevin McHale. His decisions have received a fraction of the attention that Isiah Thomas’s missteps garnered, though they’ve been nearly as disastrous.

Some have taken the T’wolves’ slide in recent years as a sign of the Garnett’s dimishing skill, but nothing could be further from the truth. Garnett remains among the league’s elite, even at 30. In 2004–05, according to my Player Efficiency Rating (PER, a perminute measure of a player’s statistical effectiveness), Garnett was the best player in the NBA, and in 2005–06 he ranked fifth.

The problem has been his supporting cast,which,by the end of last season,was a bigger joke than the Knicks’ salary cap management. Looking at Minnesota’s year-end roster, swingman Ricky Davis was Garnett’s only teammate who could plausibly have started for another team — a shocking state of affairs for a team that was in the conference finals only two years earlier.

As I mentioned in my recent story on the contracts teams will be looking to move this summer, McHale has made a series of wasteful decisions that denuded the talent base: signing secondary players like Trenton Hassell, Troy Hudson, Michael Olowokandi, Eddie Griffin and Mark Madsen to big contracts and, in the piece de resistance, trading Sam Cassell and a first-round pick to the Clippers last summer for the right to overpay Marko Jaric.

McHale has proven equally overmatched in the draft, with recent selections William Avery and Ndudi Ebi washing out of the league and last year’s pick, Rashad McCants, struggling last season (McCants also had microfracture knee surgery after the season and probably won’t be back until 2007–08).

Of course, the T’wolves would have more young talent on hand if it weren’t for McHale’s participation in the Joe Smith fiasco. That smooth move cost the club four first-round draft picks as a penalty for circumventing the salary cap — all to retain the services of a player who wasn’t even that good.

But I write this column not to bury McHale … yet. No, today I want to talk about his final shot at redemption. By all indications, he has one more year to fix this mess, or Garnett will demand a trade and ownership will finally demand McHale’s ouster.

To McHale’s credit, he seems to have taken a couple of steps in the right direction. He got started midway through last season, dealing Olowokandi and Wally Szczerbiak to Boston for Davis, Mark Blount, and Marcus Banks.

Davis’s future value isn’t much different from Szczerbiak’s, especially with the current rules environment favoring players who can get to the rim. Blount, while grossly overpaid, is comparatively less worthless than Olowokandi (this being my early submission for Backhanded Compliment of the Year honors) and could end up as the openingday center. And Banks, should he resign in Minnesota, would be the perfect energetic, youthful complement to the veteran James.

Further, McHale tabbed Villanova star Randy Foye in the draft, a move that I panned at the time but has looked awfully good so far in the summer league. Observers swear Foye has been the best player on the floor in Las Vegas, with such a great first step that his questionable outside shooting ability hasn’t been an issue.

Obviously, this may change when the real games start, as many a summer league phenom has bit the dust come November. It’s an indicator, don’t get me wrong, but playing well against other rookies in a near-playground atmosphere for a week in Sin City is very different than taking it to the tin against Ben Wallace in the fourth quarter in January. Nonetheless, Foye’s performance has been encouraging, and he’s probably one of the most NBA-ready rookies — an important consideration for a team in need of immediate repair.

Then there’s James, the biggest catch yet.This move isn’t without risks, as James is 31 and has never played even remotely as well as he did last season. Most guards his age begin declining rapidly, so the T’wolves need to hope he bucks the odds.

However, don’t look at what James did with the Raptors — a near-certain fluke year — but rather at what he accomplished in the two previous seasons. It’s hard for folks to get a good read on how well he played because he bounced around so much — he played for four teams in that time — but he was a quality scoring point guard who could hit the outside shot and pressure the ball. I imagine he can be that player for at least another couple of years in the Land O’ Lakes, which makes him a decent value.

If Foye is a real player and James can deliver reasonable production from the point, then Minnesota’s backcourt suddenly goes from a liability to a major plus. The T’wolves still have Banks as a possibility and players like Hudson and Jaric in reserve — with the key phrase here being in reserve. I wouldn’t trust Hudson or Jaric to direct my team’s offense unless I was held at gunpoint, but as second-unit players their scoring skills could enliven a unit that was moribund last year.

But the question is whether McHale’s moves can enliven the roster enough to convince Garnett to stick things out up north. The spruced-up backcourt will help, but the Big Ticket still has very little company up front. Blount is a backup-quality player who will be forced to start, while Griffin’s defensive efforts are largely limited to Minneapolis-area courtrooms. The team also has little depth and remains vulnerable to injuries.

Whether McHale’s makeover works isn’t just a big question for Minnesota. It also affects Chicago, and Detroit, and Denver, and the two Los Angeles clubs, and all the other teams that covet Garnett’s many talents. So while the T’- wolves aren’t a major draw for fans, all eyes in NBA front offices will be watching them closely this season, waiting to pounce with trade offers at the first sign of disaffection from Garnett.

Mr. Hollinger is the author of the 2005–06 Pro Basketball Forecast. He can be reached at jhollinger@nysun.com.