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Kevin Garnett Leaves Behind Legacy as NBA’s Most Beloved Bully
- Updated: September 24, 2016
Kevin Garnett is leaving the Minnesota Timberwolves and the NBA relatively quietly, and that’s a little weird for a player whose career has been defined by high volume and confrontation.
The iconic forward won’t play for the Wolves this season and is expected to announce his retirement, according to Kent Youngblood of the Star Tribune.
A genuine game-changer and indisputably one of the best players the league has ever known, Garnett leaves behind a complicated legacy. Underlying his competitive greatness was a sort of selective ferocity. Manically intense and devoted to winning, KG will be remembered nearly as much for his mold-busting game as his countless episodes of chippy on-court barking.
It’s just that the targets of his intensity were often soft ones, and his willingness to follow through on all that scowling chatter seemed to often depend on the readiness of the victim to fight back.
This is how you describe a bully—albeit one more widely revered and generally celebrated than most.
Because bullies take cheap shots that inspire responses like this from Charlie Villanueva (via Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo Sports): “K.G. called me a cancer patient. K.G. talks a lot of crap. He’s [probably] never been in a fight. I would love to get in a ring with him. I will expose him.”
There was also the time he bonked the mighty Andrea Bargnani and then threw hands to the sky proclaiming innocence:
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And he was especially confrontational with noted tough guy Jose Calderon:
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In contrast, Garnett was decidedly less willing to push the envelope with more formidable figures such as Carmelo Anthony and Metta World Peace—players with actual track records of on-court fighting.
Perhaps to …
