As the Minnesota Timberwolves’ disappointing season grinds into its final stages, the grim reality is that they must part with a local legend who was instrumental in bringing the franchise from the expansion doldrums into respectability.

If you think I’m talking about all world power forward Kevin Garnett, you have the wrong Kevin. It’s time to send team president Kevin McHale packing. That’s the only hope the T-Wolves have to build a winner before Garnett leaves town of his own accord in 2009.

Trading Garnett now, an idea that has been bandied about by the press for years, would be a disaster. These superstar-for-bits-and-pieces trades almost always blow up in the face of the team unloading the superstar. Just look at what Toronto got for Vince Carter: a draft pick and a useless forward, Eric Williams, who mans the end of their bench. Los Angeles has Lamar Odom to show for the Shaquille O’Neal deal. But even if this were not the case, McHale is not a team executive you want making that deal. His track record in handling personnel matters is abysmal.

McHale drafted Garnett with the fifth overall pick in 1995 in one of his first moves as vice president of team operations in Minnesota; his second key move, drafting Ray Allen and trading him for Stephon Marbury, looked pretty sharp, too. When Marbury wanted out of Minnesota in 1999, McHale traded him for a better point guard, Terrell Brandon. It seemed McHale was off to a stellar career as a personnel judge, but it all stopped there. In the last six years, his reign of error has bordered on the comic.

Two things have masked McHale’s incompetence. In 2004, the Timberwolves reached the Western Conference finals, but the run was abetted by graybeard castoffs Sam Cassell and Latrell Sprewell. Sprewell was acquired in a summer 2003 trade that actually made former Knicks GM Scott Layden look good. Spree, who, at 33 was already old for a perimeter player, had a good season in Minneapolis, but nothing that suggested he was going to defy father time. Nevertheless, McHale offered him a three-year,$21 million contract. Offering to pay a declining player until he’s 37 is probably something even Isiah Thomas, who retired at 32, wouldn’t do. Luckily for McHale, Sprewell infamously rejected the offer citing concerns about feeding his family on such a paltry sum.

McHale is also given slack for his lack of draft choices, since the team lost four first-rounders as a penalty for trying to circumvent the salary cap in a deal with Joe Smith. Never mind that Smith wasn’t worth breaking the rules, the T-Wolves’ track record suggests that little good would have come of those lost picks.

Why? In 1999, McHale took William Avery with the 14th pick, well ahead of Andrei Kirilenko, Scott Padgett, and Ron Artest (who didn’t have a rep then). In 2003, McHale used his first-rounder to take Ndudi Ebi ahead of useful players like Steve Blake, Luke Walton, and Keith Bogans. Ebi’s career lasted 19 games.

McHale’s record in free agency is easily boiled down to two horrible decisions. In 2002, he let Chauncey Billups leave via free agency. The widespread storyline that Billups blossomed in Detroit is a tad overdone. He was a quality player in Minnesota who became a star-level player in Detroit, where he was surrounded by a better collection of teammates.

The other defining decision for McHale’s was signing Michael Olowokandi to a $16.2 million deal the following year. As much as I advocate giving centers more time than other players to develop, I can’t condone giving the Candy Man a second chance. Not only did he have five years in Los Angeles to show that he wasn’t even close to being a league average player, but he was 28 at the time of the signing. Very few players improve after that age, and Olowokandi was no exception – he averaged 6.1 points and 5.5 rebounds per game in 2 1/2 seasons before being dumped on Boston this season as part of the Wally Szczerbiak trade. That trade did make the T-Wolves younger and deeper, but at a cost of absorbing Mark Blount’s onerous contract; that’s the price of bad signings: acquiring more bad contracts.

Given McHale’s track record, maybe it isn’t far-fetched for Knicks fans to dream of a trade that would send Marbury back to Minnesota for Garnett. TWolves owner Glen Taylor should step in and make sure it doesn’t happen.

At 28-39 with seven losses in their last nine games, the T-Wolves look like a desperate team, but there’s reason for optimism in the Twin Cities. New coach Dwane Casey has the team playing aggressive defense (they currently 11th in Defensive Efficiency, a measure of points allowed per 100 possessions), and there is a promising group of young players including Eddie Griffin, Marcus Banks, Justin Reed, and Rashad McCants. The only millstone contracts – Troy Hudson and Mark Blount – are in the $6 million to $8 million per year range, and thus might be swappable in the way that Steve Francis’s pact isn’t. Trading Garnett in the typical superstar deal, however, would leave the franchise in shambles for years.

The Timberwolves can be turned around, but McHale isn’t the man to do it. His stature in Minnesota as its greatest high school and collegiate hoopster earned him a lot of rope, but he’s used it all up. His tenure is yet another reminder that former players, even Hall of Famers, aren’t automatically insightful about building a team. But New York basketball fans are already painfully aware of that.

mjohnson@nysun.com