With 22 wins and 60 losses, the first season of Wolves in 1989-1990 (as often for new franchises) was not a great sporting success. On the other hand, the Minneapolis team had still marked the history of the NBA upon its arrival.
How ? By playing at home at the Metrodome, the setting usually reserved for the NFL or MLB team, which was demolished in 2014. A decision which is explained by the fact that the Target Center, the room where Wolves still play today was not finished at the start of the 1989/90 season.
Result: instead of a room that revolves around 20,000 seats, the Wolves sometimes enjoyed more than double. Like April 13, 1990 against Orlando, where 45,450 people had crowded there.
Four days later, it’s even better with 49,551 fans against Denver. Almost 50,000 spectators! Even if they left disappointed since the Wolves had lost (99-89).
Still today, it is the fifth highest attendance in NBA history for a game, behind two games in Detroit, against Philadelphia in 1987 (52,745) and against Boston in 1988 (61,983). the Atlanta – Chicago of March 27, 1998 with 62,064 people attending Michael Jordan’s last in the city and the record, broken this season by the Spurs to celebrate their 50th anniversary.
At the end of the season, and before joining the Target Center in 1990, the Wolves thus set the absolute record for spectators during a regular season: 1,072,572, or more than 26,000 on average. They had thus overtaken the Pistons of 1987/88, which had then gathered 1,066,505 people in the spans of the Silverdome.
By way of comparison, this year, the Bulls topped this ranking with a total of 841,632 spectators in the 41 games played in Chicago, an average of 20,527. But out of all the teams, the NBA broke an attendance record this season with more than 22 million spectators in its halls in total!
