From The Mag: The Cruel Tutelage of the Wolves' Kevin Garnett
Long article but worth the read..wolves really got next
EDIT: Highlighted the most entertaining parts
Long article but worth the read..wolves really got next
EDIT: Highlighted the most entertaining parts
WATCHING WAS WASTEFUL, he thought, counterintuitive. Kevin Garnett loathed it. He'd spit at anyone who implored him to embrace it, even as his balky knee howled for a respite. Watching, to Garnett, implied vulnerability. It undercut his contention that he could go harder, longer, better than these fledglings who thought they knew it all.
Garnett actually knew. Greatness -- the pursuit of it -- was slippery, elusive, dependent on myriad variables, like health, conditioning, team chemistry, luck. But some components shouldn't be left to chance, and preparation was one of them. "Kevin had this belief that if you were the leader, you couldn't miss one snap of practice," says Doc Rivers, who coached Garnett in Boston from 2007 to 2013. "But I had this belief that you are 30-whatever and I need you for the whole season."
And so in February 2009 the coach sat down his future Hall of Famer. Not to skip a game. Rivers just wanted him to miss a practice.
"Coach, you don't understand," Garnett seethed. "If I'm sitting, they will see weakness."
Relegated to the practice-facility sideline, pacing, growling and cursing to himself, Garnett pulled up suddenly, an idea churning, a maniacal grin creasing his face. He unleashed a howl; his teammates glanced in his direction. They knew something was about to happen.
This was, after all, the superstar who had once dropped to all fours and barked at Portland rookie point guard Jerryd Bayless; whose pregame ritual was a violent head-banging assault of, and concurrent conversation with, the basketball stanchion; who would years later express his umbrage at Dwight Howard's post play by drilling him with an impromptu head-butt in the first quarter of a 2015 regular-season game against Houston.
Garnett, forbidden to take the floor by his own coach, had concocted his revenge: He would track the movements of power forward Leon Powe, the player who had replaced him in the lineup. As Powe pivoted, so did Garnett. As Powe leaped to grab a defensive rebound, Garnett launched himself to corral an imaginary ball. As Powe snapped an outlet pass, Garnett mimicked the motion, then sprinted up his slim sliver of sideline real estate as Powe filled the lane on the break. The players were mirror images: one on the court with a full complement of teammates, the other out of bounds, alone. Two men engaged in a bizarre basketball tango.
"KG," Rivers barked, "if you keep doing this, I'm canceling practice for the whole team. That will hurt us."
Garnett's reverence for coaches was legendary, but still he turned his back on Rivers. He returned to his defensive stance, an isotope of intensity, crouched, palms outstretched, in complete concert with Powe. He was, in fact, becoming so adept at this warped dalliance he'd invented, he actually began to anticipate Powe's movements, denying the entry pass to his invisible opponent before Powe thought of it.
Finally, an exasperated Rivers blew the whistle. "Go home," Rivers instructed his team. Then he glared at Garnett. "I hope you're happy."
Garnett was far from happy. He was, at best, resolute. He'd told his teammates countless times that there was no such thing as a day off. Why couldn't Doc understand that the most effective way for him to lead was to show his teammates how it's done? "Let's work!" he screamed to his departing teammates, pounding his chest. "Let's work!"
Powe and the others wandered off, mystified.
"'What is he doing?' That's what we were saying," Powe recalls today. "And at that point you start wondering, Is KG maybe a little crazy after all?"
WITH AS MUCH as we talk about "mentors" in sports, it's arguable whether they even exist. The notion that veteran stars might willingly groom younger players to supplant them is naive at best, misguided at worst. Witness Carmelo Anthony welcoming a young Jeremy Lin into the Knicks' rotation, or Kobe Bryant's struggle to confront his own mortality while ostensibly shepherding D'Angelo Russell, or whatever it is that Michael Jordan did with (or to) Kwame Brown.
Rivers knows how rare true mentorship can be. "You have to get ones who are ready to let go of who they were and be what you need them to be now," he says. So it is that Minnesota's decision to entrust No. 1 pick Karl-Anthony Towns to the tutelage of Kevin Garnett is, to put it mildly, a compelling and sizable gamble.
When the Wolves acquired Garnett this past February, before Towns had been drafted, they took on a 38-year-old with a $12 million salary and a history of knee problems. Flip Saunders was the driving force behind the decision to bring KG into the fold, citing Garnett's ability to flourish as a rookie under the watchful eye of former teammate Sam Mitchell, who is now the Timberwolves' interim coach. The idea was to pay that experience forward. Garnett, who signed a new two-year, $16.5 million guaranteed deal after he arrived, is the first to concede that his value is no longer to produce on the court. The Wolves are banking on his intangibles: the work ethic, the experience, the ability to motivate. Garnett, for his part, says Towns reminds him much of himself at the same age. "His confidence might be a little higher than mine was at this point," he says. "It's modern day. Kids are exposed to so much more. Karl listens. He's smart, but like so many young players, he likes to think he knows a lot. He's got a lot of swag. So that's what's up. We'll deal."
Former teammate Chauncey Billups maintains that Garnett is the most unselfish superstar of his era and the most dynamic leader he has seen. Then again, if Towns is devoured by KG's fire, he wouldn't be the first. A partial list of ex-teammates who have endured the wrath of the Big Ticket includes Glen "Big Baby" Davis, Mason Plumlee, Ray Allen, Wally Szczerbiak, Rajon Rondo, Rasho Nesterovic, Patrick O'Bryant and Deron Williams. Some have survived to be welcomed into Garnett's inner circle; others are forever dead to him. "If you don't meet his expectations," says Celtics president of basketball operations Danny Ainge, "he has no use for you."
Rivers, whose eyes still water when he attempts to articulate what Garnett has meant to him, says that before he coached him, he considered Garnett's ferocity to be contrived. Then he watched Big Baby Davis and the Celtics' subs nearly blow a 25-point lead against the Trail Blazers on Dec. 5, 2008, their third game in five nights. During a timeout with 6:04 remaining, with Boston's lead whittled to 13, Rivers watched Garnett, mid-diatribe, grab Davis, who was standing with hands on his hips, head down, several feet from the huddle. He listened as Garnett undressed Davis and the reserves for blowing what should have been an insurmountable advantage, forcing the starters to return to the game. Afterward, Davis, then in his second year, retreated to the end of the bench, snapped his towel onto the floor and wept.
Nobody -- not even Allen and Paul Pierce -- were immune from KG's outbursts. And although Garnett counts Rondo, whom he played with for six seasons in Boston, among his closest friends, he didn't hesitate to boot the point guard from practice if he felt Rondo was going through the motions. According to Rivers, that happened more than once. "He'd tell Rondo, 'Get the f--- out! You're not playing defense!'" Rivers says. "He told him the truth. Rondo needed more of that."
That intensity followed him to the arena, where Garnett systematically ratcheted himself into a force to be reckoned with, both by the opposition and his teammates. "When Kevin came through those doors on game day, he was angry," says Celtics guard Avery Bradley, who played with Garnett for three seasons. "We couldn't laugh, talk, listen to music. We'd all hide in the training room or the bathroom -- wherever KG wasn't."
Billups, who teamed with Garnett in Minnesota from 2000 to '02, says one of his most vivid memories of Garnett is from a Timberwolves shootaround in which Saunders tried to familiarize the team with its next opponent. The coach attempted to run through that team's offensive sets for the starters but was thwarted by Garnett, who refused to stop denying his player the ball during the walk-through. "I warned KG," Billups says. "I told him, 'You keep yelling this s--- at people and someone is going to come back at you.'"
That guy, Billups says, was former Wolves teammate Wally Szczerbiak. "I got along with Wally just fine, but he was kind of a know-it-all," Billups says. "I took his arrogance to be a positive all players gotta have, but KG took it a different way. It was KG's team, his voice, his show, his everything. Anyone who differed was going to be an outcast."
The tension boiled over during a November 2000 practice, when Szczerbiak reportedly got picked off and chided Garnett to call out the screens. KG responded curtly, "Play some defense," the pickoff seemingly a consequence for whatever expectation Szczerbiak wasn't meeting defensively. Szczerbiak took exception. It accelerated into a shouting match, which spilled into the training room. Punches were thrown. Ask Szczerbiak about it today and he says he was simply a young player trying to stick up for himself. "I felt like I had some leadership qualities," he says. "I'm not a guy who will take a back seat all the time, and in certain scenarios I'm going to speak up for what's right. At times it definitely got me in trouble."
Worth noting: the fact that Szczerbiak and Garnett played six-plus seasons together and were teammates in the 2002 All-Star Game. "We figured it out," Szczerbiak says.
Others weren't so lucky.
Consider former Celtic Patrick O'Bryant, the ninth pick in the 2006 draft. Early in the 2008-09 season, O'Bryant was putting in some post work with Celtics assistant coach Clifford Ray after practice when Garnett summoned him to the other end of the floor. KG wanted to light a fire under the young center, who he felt was too placid. Garnett immediately began berating O'Bryant, criticizing him mercilessly. When O'Bryant didn't react, KG pushed harder. Still nothing. Garnett walked off the court in disgust.
"You know how he is," O'Bryant says. "He was yelling and screaming, trying to get me to scream back, but that's not who I am. I don't need to yell at someone all the way down the court after I dunk. Just because I didn't have a mean look on my face didn't mean I wasn't listening."
From that day forward, those close to the team say, Garnett would go out of his way to bully O'Bryant. Normally a pass-first player, KG would take the ball forcefully to the hole if O'Bryant was guarding him in practice. He subjected him to a nonstop stream of insults to break him. "Patrick would miss a shot, and he'd just torture him," Powe says. "Kevin wasn't going to forgive him. He'd talk crazy to him. We told Patrick, 'Don't let him get under your skin,' but it was too late." Twenty-six games into his Celtics career, on Feb. 19, 2009, Boston traded O'Bryant, who today maintains he learned a lot from Garnett and doesn't remember being bullied, to Toronto for a 2014 second-round pick. He would play just 24 more games in his NBA career.
"Kevin destroyed him," Rivers says. "It was mean-spirited."
"Just because someone doesn't play with the same fire as KG, it doesn't mean they're soft," Billups says. "It also doesn't mean they don't care, but in KG's raving, crazy mind, that's how he sees it. If he sees something one time, that's what he believes in, no matter what. That's not always great for a leader, I admit that, but that's who he is."
It was for that reason, Ainge says, that he was careful which young players he entrusted to Garnett -- and why Minnesota's plan might be less than foolproof. Sometimes a player came in, Ainge says, "and it was a little scary to have KG around him. His work ethic was unquestioned, but he could be intimidating -- and destructive -- if the player didn't respond in the right way."
"I always say, 'I'm not stepping on someone who doesn't want to be stepped on,'" Garnett says. "Because this is a no-nonsense league. If you're not in it, and I mean in it today, then they will replace you tomorrow."
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at mimicking powells movements for a whole practice 
