Minnesota sports littered with examples of reviled figures who got one big thing right

Kevin Fiala's ascent as one of the Wild's best and most promising players has turned into a victory lap in absentia for former general manager Paul Fenton.

There were plenty of questionable things about his tenure, the full weight of which added up to Fenton being fired after just one season on the job, but trading Mikael Granlund for Fiala is looking like his brightest shining moment.

It got me thinking about other figures in Minnesota sports history who maybe, ahem, aren't viewed favorably overall — and how so many of them at least got one very big thing right.

For example …

*David Kahn: The former Wolves executive was bad at a lot of things, but he was actually pretty good at accumulating draft capital. His best move was turning Mike Miller and Randy Foye into the No. 5 pick in the 2009 draft in a swap with Washington. Kahn of course loses major points for whiffing on drafting Stephen Curry that year with both the No. 5 and No. 6 picks, but with a little more lottery luck his tenure might have been remembered quite differently.

*Bill Smith: His four seasons as Twins general manager featured some questionable trades and ended with a disastrous 2011 season. But he also presided over one of the best runs of international free agent signings in Twins history in 2009. That summer, the Twins signed Miguel Sano, Jorge Polanco and Max Kepler. It's hard to imagine where they would be without those three players in 2020.

*Cheryl Littlejohn: The Gophers women's basketball team went 29-81 overall and 7-57 in Cheryl Littlejohn's four seasons as head coach. It's amazing, then, what rose from the ashes of her tenure: two of the best players in Gophers history — Lindsay Whalen and Janel McCarville — were both recruited and signed by Littlejohn before she was fired in 2001. There might not be a bigger juxtaposition in local sports history.

*Fran Foley: The former Vikings personnel director typically has his three-month tenure in that job described as either a punchline or a footnote. It takes a lot to fire someone after that short of a stint — just days, in fact, after he was a central figure in the Vikings' 2006 draft. But that Vikings draft class, which was panned at the time, actually proved to be better than average according to advanced metrics. First-round pick Chad Greenway was a defensive anchor for a decade; second-rounder Cedric Griffin had a seven-year career with 72 starts; and fourth-rounder Ray Edwards was a solid starter.

*Mike Yeo: The former Wild coach's four-plus season tenure tends to be remembered in terms of what Minnesota didn't do instead of what it did do, but there's also this: The Wild has only advanced past the first round of the NHL playoffs three times, and two of those happened while Yeo was head coach.

*Tom Thibodeau: The Timberwolves' 2017-18 season was often a joyless and grinding march instead of a free-flowing stroll, but if you believed — as Thibodeau did — that winning was the only thing that mattered it's hard to quibble with what is still the only playoff appearance in franchise history that didn't come with Kevin Garnett on the roster. The Wolves went 47-35, and Thibodeau's prize acquisition — Jimmy Butler — played a key role. It wasn't sustainable, at least not how the Wolves went about it, but sometimes winning instead of rebuilding isn't all bad.