Timberwolves agree to extend lease seven years in exchange for $48m in arena renovation subsidies

Last year’s announced plan to renovate the Minnesota Timberwolves‘ Target Center, which was already renovated once in 2004, has finally been finalized (the city council will vote on it two weeks from today), and it actually doesn’t look quite as bad as it did originally: The total cost is now down to $97 million (from an initial $150 million estimate), the team and city will roughly split the costs, and the T-Wolves have agreed to extend their lease from 2025 to 2032 as part of the deal. So on the bright side, you can say the city is spending about $7 million for each year of new lease, which is, um, better than it could be?

On the less bright side, the Timberwolves owners managed to extract this deal despite having more than a decade to run on their existing lease, simply by tagging along on the Vikings stadium deal and saying, “Hey, what about us?” So this doesn’t actually guarantee that Minneapolis won’t be asked to put in more money to the Target Center before 2032 — or, heck, to build a whole new arena. It’ll be more than 40 years old by then, after all, and arenas are required to be sent to the carousel after 30.