Flip Saunders doesn’t think Kevin Garnett can coach because ‘he gets frustrated pretty easy’

Earlier this week, Brooklyn Nets big man Kevin Garnett eclipsed 49,000 career regular season minutes. Working in his 20th NBA season, the future Hall of Famer has also logged over 5200 playoff minutes spread out over 143 career postseason games, a remarkable feat for someone that treats a game in East Rutherford, NJ on a Friday night the same way he does Game 7 of the NBA Finals. Garnett works himself into a sweat before the game even starts, he has a famous pump-up routine he performs in front of the basket stanchion prior to tip, he clearly plays all out, and he’s usually the last to leave the locker room after taking one of his notoriously-long postgame showers.

The man is exhausting, and it’s to his credit that he’s made it this long considering his style of amplification. Garnett’s contract is up after this season, though, and he’s clearly on the decline. It’s possible that he might want to sign one more NBA contract pitched just 20 years after he was drafted out of high school in 1995, but the 2014-15 season could be it.

What’s next for the man with 15 All-Star appearances, one MVP trophy, and one championship ring to his name? Coaching in the NBA?

Garnett’s former coach in Minnesota, the current coach in Minnesota Flip Saunders, isn’t seeing it. From the New York Post:

When asked before the game if his former star pupil could become a coach in the future, Timberwolves coach Flip Saunders didn’t hesitate with his response.

“No,” Saunders said with a smile. “What he could be is he could be a good consultant, short-term stuff.

“He’s got great knowledge, and he’d be great working with players. But his frustration … he gets frustrated pretty easy. That would be pretty tough on a coach.

“He might be a short-term guy, but it’s not because of lack of knowledge. His personality, his DNA, he’d get too frustrated.

This is, you’ll deduce, a nice way of saying that Kevin Garnett should not become an NBA head coach because he will probably make a player or two cry before the end of his first week on the sideline.

This is understandable. Rare is the NBA superstar that becomes a fantastic head coach. The most recent and perhaps best example of this would be Larry Bird’s time in Indiana – Bird basically turned his on-court personality completely inside-out while relying on two lead assistants in Rick Carlisle and Dick Harter to do most of the Xs and Os work. Even then, Bird could only last for three years before walking away from the gig. Jason Kidd, on his second team in two years, has done some clever things but the jury is still out on him thus far.

It might be an incorrect practice – many greats have been denied coaching opportunities that they’ve sought after – but typically ex-player coaching jobs go to guys who were solid enough (Doc Rivers was an All-Star, once), starter worthy (Derek Fisher’s recent hire comes to mind, as does Lionel Hollins) or role playing journeyman (ladies and gentlemen, Scott Brooks). We already know why Allen Iverson doesn’t want to coach, but nobody expecting, say, Kobe Bryant, Dirk Nowitzki, or KG to be fielding heaps of offers when they decide to hang it up.

Which might be just fine for Garnett, a loyal type that would want some sort of certainty as he takes to someone’s staff. Just watching the way Garnett has sweated around the floor for nearly two decades, it makes complete and total sense that he might just want to disappear into his Laz-y-Boy for a while.

Kidd and Hollins have coached Garnett in consecutive years, and though his 2014-15 per game numbers have shot up slightly because of an increased minutes per game workload, his work so far is a slight decline from what was a tough 2013-14 season. That’s not going to stop Saunders, in town with his Wolves to take on the Nets, from praising the player he started coaching some 229 months ago. From the Post:

“He worked harder this summer,” Saunders said. “I think he didn’t like how things ended, and he recommitted himself and got back to running the sand dunes and everything else to get to where he wanted to get. The one thing is you can never count him out on anything. He’s too competitive, there’s too much passion to ever count him out.”

So why not hand the man a clipboard?

Oh, yeah, that’s right. He’ll break it over your head. And he’d probably be right to do so.

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Kelly Dwyer is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @KDonhoops