How Matt Lloyd went from mowing lawns at a pet cemetery to Timberwolves GM

Last year a package arrived unexpectedly at Matt Lloyd’s apartment in downtown Minneapolis. It took him a minute to peel the heavy packing tape off of the non-descript box, so he could open the flaps to reveal what was inside.

The contents would simultaneously take him back to his days as a basketball-crazed boy in the Chicago suburbs and bring reflection on what has been an improbable rise to general manager of the Minnesota Timberwolves.

“Oh my gosh,” he said, suddenly cloaked in a blanket of nostalgia warm enough to insulate him from a Minnesota winter.

The box contained all eight editions of “Rick Barry’s Pro Basketball Scouting Report,” an exhaustive compilation of statistics and analysis of NBA players that was first published in 1989, the season before Michael Jordan won his first championship with the Chicago Bulls. It was the closest thing to Basketball Reference that stat heads and hoops obsessives could have before the internet.

The gift came from Jordan Cohn, who co-authored the books with Barry before embarking on a long career as an NBA scout. Every time Cohn crosses paths on the scouting circuit with Lloyd, the erstwhile Lloyd will lavish Cohn with praise and thanks for all of his hard work.

“He calls me the legend,” Cohn says with puzzled exasperation in his voice. “You know, it’s a little embarrassing, but he just loves the books.”

In a small way, Cohn’s work played a role in the events of this summer. Lloyd interviewed to run the Charlotte Hornets front office and then turned down a chance to be second-in-command there under Jeff Peterson so he could stay in Minnesota, where he was the general manager of a team that enters this season with NBA Finals aspirations.

Lloyd has climbed the ranks from the video room of the Jordan Bulls through the PR department and front offices in Chicago and Orlando before playing an essential role in the turnaround of one of the league’s long-struggling franchises.

“He’s one of the most well-respected guys in our profession,” Timberwolves president of basketball operation Tim Connelly said. “He’s got the acumen and the work ethic and he’s got a wonderful emotional IQ. Someone really smart is going to hire him as their president.”

Lloyd wasn’t a great player in high school; he didn’t even play as a senior at Bensenville High. He does not have the kind of coaching background that can sometimes open doors to scouting and front-office work.

What has driven Lloyd to the heights he has reached and made him a name to watch as lead executive jobs spring up around the league is instead an insatiable thirst for knowledge and information about the game and all of the players in it. That started as a teenager as he thumbed through the pages of that scouting report every fall.

His mother and stepfather would buy him the book every season, a way to stay connected to a boy who couldn’t get enough of it.

“Matt was always fascinated by the statistics,” Louise Solka, Lloyd’s mother, said. “I mean, fascinated.”

This was long before Google, before every statistic and scouting breakdown for every player was a few keystrokes away, and before every game was available to be streamed on NBA League Pass. There was an element of mystery for even some of the most ardent basketball fans that was unlocked for Lloyd in the pages of those books.

“That was the internet,” Lloyd said. “That was how you found out information back then, you read it in books. I would read it over and over and over every year.”

The books were the brainchild of Cohn, who at the time was a freelance writer for HOOP magazine and other publications and looking to make a living while writing about the league. He noticed a similar book about pro hockey and decided to try his hand at creating an NBA version. He sold the idea to a small publisher in Chicago, but it came with a caveat. Cohn needed to find a big name to attach to it to get the audience’s attention.

Cohn had interviewed Barry for a magazine piece in the past, so he reached out to gauge his interest. Barry, a television analyst at the time, agreed. Cohn would call assistant coaches, scouts and staffers across the league to compile a deep reservoir of scouting intel on every player, every summer. Barry would read the entire book before publication and offer his detailed insights as well, then help with promoting the book in the run-up to the season.

How did they sell?

“Poorly,” Cohn said with a chuckle.

It may not have led to a financial windfall for Cohn, but it did pave the way for his entry to the league as a scout. He has worked for the Miami Heat, Brooklyn Nets and Philadelphia 76ers and is starting his fourth season with the LA Clippers.

As Cohn was transitioning from writing to scouting, Lloyd was getting his first taste of the NBA as well. He broke into the league at the bottom of the Chicago Bulls organization, working in the video room during the halcyon days of the organization, when Jordan, Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman held the league in the palms of their hands. He would put together projects for the Bulls coaches and front office during basketball season, occasionally bumping into Madonna or Eddie Vedder in the back hallways of the United Center, and then do the same for the Chicago White Sox, also owned by Jerry Reinsdorf, in the summer.

It was heaven for a Chicago kid and his family. When he thinks back on those days, the championships were fun, the celebrities were head-turning. But what he remembers most is sitting in a team suite high above the court before the games and calling his grandmother during introductions. He would time it just right so he could hold up the phone and she could hear the roar when Jordan was announced.

“My grandma was such a huge fan,” Lloyd said. “I just wanted her to hear it.”

Tales of Lloyd’s thoughtfulness and graciousness flow through the league’s bloodstream like Gatorade. He got to know former Bulls great John Paxson well during his days in PR with the Bulls, and Paxson gave him his first chance on the basketball side of the business when he took over as GM. Lloyd’s work ethic and attitude also caught the eye of legendary Bulls executive Jerry Krause, who would give a young Lloyd tutorials on scouting. Lloyd would eventually work his way up to the director of college scouting during a 13-year stay in Chicago.

When Lloyd saw Rob Hennigan sitting alone at the Tournament of Americas in San Antonio early on in his scouting career, Lloyd went up and introduced himself to make him feel more welcome.

Years later, when Hennigan was hired to run the Magic, he lured Lloyd away from the Bulls to join him. Lloyd spent 10 years in Orlando, serving as interim general manager for a brief time after Hennigan was fired in 2017.

When the Magic decided to go outside the organization to hire Jeff Weltman and John Hammond, Lloyd could have held onto the disappointment and bitterness of being passed over. Instead, he remained positive and was retained by the new regime.

“Never heard him complain, never heard him say a bad word about anyone else,” said Hammond, the Magic GM for the previous six years before he moved into a senior advisory role this summer. “And just a guy that you enjoy working with and enjoy being around him.”

None of this is news to Lloyd’s wife, Cortney, who met Matt while she was working in the sports information department at Northwestern in the late 1990s. The two were married in 2000 and had no idea back then that 25 years later they would be living in Minnesota and helping the Timberwolves go where they have rarely gone before.

If anything, Cortney has had to reassure her husband throughout the climb. The higher he gets, the harder it can be for him to believe that he has made it this far.

“Matt is so humble,” she said. “Every day he wakes up and just can’t believe he is in the position he’s in. Do I deserve this? Is this something I deserve?”

This was never where he expected to be, not when he was growing up in Bensenville, Ill., the son of a single mother who had Matt when she was 19. Louise worked as a nurse to provide for Matt and his younger sister. Matt’s grandparents, aunts and uncles rallied around the family to help out with childcare.

Louise remarried when Matt was 14, but money was tight so he worked a lot as a kid to help make ends meet, including mowing lawns at a pet cemetery owned by his aunt and uncle.

“They had this giant plot of land and it was so big that it would take all week to mow the whole thing,” he said. “It was a great job.”

He played basketball up through his junior season — “My self-scouting report is I played hard, but probably hurt the team a little,” he said. — and then quit so he could work during his senior year and earn money for college. It’s a decision that he regrets to this day, but it was emblematic of the work ethic and sacrifice he learned from his mother.

“Everybody else comes before him,” Cortney said. “He puts everybody else first, which is such an endearing quality. It’s one of his best qualities.”

Years ago, Lloyd was scouting for the Bulls at a DePaul game when he was seated next to a young, talkative scout from the Washington Wizards. The two hit it off so well that they ended up sharing a rental car to drive to Gary, Ind., for the CBA All-Star Game and a friendship built from there. That Wizards scout was Connelly. When Connelly left the Denver Nuggets to run the Timberwolves, Lloyd was one of his first calls.

“The goal was to have a staff with a huge Rolodex so we could reach every corner of the world,” Connelly said. “Matt certainly has that. More importantly, Matt is a connector internally. He’s ensuring that everything internally is running smoothly.”

Connelly puts a premium on workplace culture and Lloyd excels in interpersonal relationships. In addition to his scouting and decision-making responsibilities, Lloyd serves as a chief communicator with the staff and around the league. The result has been harmony in the front office and coaching staff, which is unique for an organization that has been beset by so much turnover in both areas for much of its existence.

“I’ve been so lucky just to have everyone just kind of pour into me a little bit and to be able to take that in and add my little spice to it is an unbelievable, unbelievable thing,” Lloyd said.

He is about to enter his third season in Minnesota, part of a front office that has been one of the most aggressive in the league. They have made major trades every year, starting with acquiring Rudy Gobert in 2022, trading D’Angelo Russell for Mike Conley and Nickeil Alexander-Walker in 2023 and, late last month, sending Karl-Anthony Towns to New York for Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo. All of the wheeling and dealing, combined with a strong young core of Anthony Edwards, Jaden McDaniels and Naz Reid have the Timberwolves entering this season with championship aspirations.

The uncommon success has thrust Lloyd into a new light. He was a part of some successful Bulls teams later in his tenure but only had two first-round exits in 10 seasons in Orlando. Connelly is one of the top lead executives in the business, and now that the Wolves are winning, other organizations are looking to see if they can mimic what is happening in Minnesota.

Charlotte was likely just the first. Lloyd went through a full interview process with the new Hornets ownership and was offered a job right under Peterson, who was named executive vice president of basketball operations. Lloyd decided to stay with Minnesota and continue building with Connelly, Dell Demps, Jon Wallace and the rest of the staff.

“It was a beneficial experience, just because as I stepped back from it, I learned that I could do it if I had the opportunity,” he said. “But I don’t ever want that to detract from my day-to-day responsibility of incrementally helping Tim move the team forward.”

While his focus remains fixed on the present, being actively recruited allowed him a moment to reflect this summer on how far he’s come. From mowing around pet headstones in Bensenville to the video room in Chicago. From calling his grandmother during Jordan’s intros to playing a role in drafting Jimmy Butler, Taj Gibson with the Bulls. From rebuilding in Orlando to loading up in Minnesota.

“I love basketball, I love watching basketball,” Lloyd said. “I love the challenge of trying to help put the team together, and so I don’t ever want to get complacent. And I want to be learning, and I want to be growing, and I want to be doing that to help the team get better.”

Lloyd, 51, still carries that thirst for knowledge from his teenage years, when he would crack open Cohn’s books and read them cover to cover. He recently sent Timberwolves color analyst Jim Petersen a picture of his scouting report from his playing days, just for fun. Matt and Cortney moved into a new place in suburban Minneapolis this summer after renting an apartment downtown for their first two years. Matt already has a spot picked out for his Rick Barry Scouting Reports.

“There are two boxes of stuff going on the bookshelf,” Cortney said. “I’m fully aware.”