The Timberwolves’ owner expects Kevin Garnett to play next year
We haven’t seen Kevin Garnett take the floor since January 23, when he played nine minutes in the Minnesota Timberwolves’ 106-101 win over the Memphis Grizzlies before bowing out of the Wolves’ lineup due to right knee soreness. He’s still been there on the sideline, coaching and talking trash and doing his part to help expedite the development of stars-in-the-making like Andrew Wiggins and Karl-Anthony Towns. But he hasn’t been out on the floor — raining sweat, barking out coverages and seeking out opposing guards on the perimeter for screens that are juuuuuuuust this side of legal — in more than two months.
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We’ve long expected that we wouldn’t see the 39-year-old legend, who earlier this year set a new NBA record for career defensive rebounds, again this season, especially since Wolves coach and former KG teammate Sam Mitchell said last month that Garnett’s injury is “a day to day, week to week thing.” We’d also largely come to accept that this meant we might never see Garnett on the court again, as many of us had come into the 2015-16 campaign expecting it to be the Big Ticket’s last run. (There’s a reason that trip back to Boston, and that renewal of pleasantries with Gino, seemed like such a big deal.)
Evidently, though, we might have been wrong. According to Darren Wolfson of 1500 ESPN in Minnesota, the owner of the Timberwolves himself says that KG might not be ready to hang up his high-tops just yet:
Spoke w/ Glen Taylor yesterday. On KG’s future: “You’d have to ask him, but from everything he’s told me, he wants to be (back).” #twolves
— Darren Wolfson (@DWolfsonKSTP) April 7, 2016
Wolfson’s note follows a March 26 report by Sid Hartman of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that similarly suggested KG might not be done:
The word around Target Center is that with only 11 Timberwolves games left this season, Kevin Garnett has told team owner Glen Taylor that he would like to play in some more games, but his knees are not healthy enough. Still, Garnett will try to get in shape during the offseason, and then decide whether he will play the second year of his contract. If Garnett were to play next season, he would tie Kevin Willis for the most seasons played by an NBA player in the history of the game at 21.
Last summer, Garnett signed a two-year, $16.5 million deal to remain in Minnesota after returning via trade to the team that drafted him back in 1995. If he can get healthy enough to come back, and he’s still passionate enough about the craft to do the work it’ll take to get back on the floor, it makes all the sense in the world for him to stick around; I mean, as great at Instagram as he is, it’s hard to imagine many people more perfectly suited for a work environment than Kevin Garnett is for playing and teaching basketball.
The Wolves might not necessarily need him to act as their greybeard leader — as Mitchell recently told Rob Mahoney of Sports Illustrated, KG’s “still a very vocal leader,” but he has “started taking a step back, pushing the young guys to be more vocal and say more” — but if nothing else, they could sure seem to use his smarts and his gifts to help make Minnesota meaner on the defensive end of the floor.
In his 556 minutes on the court this season, the Wolves allowed just 96.4 points per 100 possessions, and as Nolan Schmidt of Dunking with Wolves noted, he graded out impressively “from an advanced statistics perspective.” Despite sitting out for the last two-plus months, Garnett is still tied for the team lead in Defensive Box Plus-Minus while standing fourth in total Box Plus-Minus, and fifth on the team in Value Over Replacement Player. He also ranks among the NBA’s 10 most effective defenders according to ESPN’s Real Plus-Minus metric.
He might not be suited for more than 14 or 15 minutes a game as he enters his 40s, but he can still make an impact with his positioning, communication, passing and motivation in that limited burn if he’s healthy enough and willing enough to provide it. Glen Taylor thinks he plans to be. It’d be pretty rad if he’s right.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
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