With the fifth pick in the 1995 NBA Draft, the Minnesota Timberwolves selected Farragut Career Academy product Kevin Garnett, who became the first high school basketball player selected in the NBA draft since 1975.
The Garnett-led Timberwolves reached their apex in the summer of 2004, when they lost to the Kobe-Shaq Lakers in the Western Conference Finals. After being an elite player in the league for 12 years while playing for a middling team, Garnett requested, and received a trade to the Boston Celtics in the summer of 2008.
Dubbed “the Big 3”, Garnett, along with Celtic mainstay Paul Pierce, and the other newly acquired mercenary Ray Allen, were the core of the team that resurrected Boston Celtics basketball. Garnett was seen as the heart and soul of one of the best defenses in the modern era.
…
In the 2001 NBA Draft, the Atlanta Hawks selected Spanish sensation Pau Gasol with the third over-all pick. He was then promptly traded to the Memphis Grizzlies for the immortal Shareef Abdur-Raheem. Gasol would go on to claim Rookie of the Year honors.
NEXT: Gasol, Garnett, and the 2008 NBA Finals…
Despite individual success, Gasol was routinely the best player on a team that failed to win a single play-off game. Many began to question if Pau was a Pippen masquerading as a Jordan. However, in February of 2008, Memphis Grizzlies manager, Chris Wallace, got into a bottle of Peppermint Schnapps and traded Pau Gasol to the Los Angeles Lakers in return for Kwame Brown’s expiring contract, Javaris Crittenton, two draft picks, and the rights to Pau Gasol’s younger brother, Marc. And for the record, I made up the part about Chris Wallace drinking Schnapps before trading Pau to the Lakers. As everybody knows, a man as regal as Chris Wallace can only be seen sipping scotch on the rocks.
It was an alcohol-induced trade that caused a seismic shift in the power-structure of the NBA. Suddenly, the resurgent Lakers (that had just lost Andrew Bynum, who was having a break out year) became armed and dangerous.
At the end of the 2008 campaign, the last two teams standing were Kevin Garnett’s Celtics and Pau Gasol’s (read: Kobe Bryant’s) Lakers. It was the opening of the newest chapter in the NBA’s most fabled rivalry. A rivalry that had laid dormant for 20 years. It would be the ultimate contrast in styles.
Gasol grew up aspiring to be a doctor. He enjoys classic music, operas, and in the summer of 2008, had never lifted a single weight in his basketball career. Garnett was the trash-talking, chest-thumping, intimidating (more on this later) catalyst of one of the nastiest teams in recent memory. He had made a living out of picking on smaller (and generally foreign) players. Garnett, then the Defensive Player of the Year, looked at Gasol much like a shark looks at fish in the sea.
Frankly, I don’t remember much of the 2008 Finals. Whenever I hooked up with a woman of ill-repute during my freshman year, I simply blocked it out of my mind. It’s like it never happened. You could show me pictures, and I’d claim they were photoshopped. This is the treatment I gave the 2008 NBA Finals. I don’t remember anything. I’m told though, by people who claim that the 2008 Finals did indeed happen, that Gasol got his lunch money taken by an angry Garnett throughout the series. I haven’t seen video evidence of this (or any of the 2008 Finals), but I’m told this happened.
After the Celtics allegedly won the 2008 Finals, one of the random people that Sports Illustrated has let write on their last page since Rick Reilly left for ESPN, wrote an article called “the Death of Cool.” (I tried to Google it, but I don’t think Sports Illustrated has figured out the internet yet. I assume you can find it in a “library”–whatever those are). The gist of the article was calling out Garnett for screaming “ANYTHINNNNG’S POSSSSIBLLLE” after winning his first ring. Yes, Kevin, Adam Morrison has many NBA Championships as you, so I suppose anything is indeed possible.
NEXT: Taking different routes…
Since that fateful interview, Pau Gasol and Kevin Garnett have gone two different ways. While the 2008-2009 Celtics started hot, they were punked by the Lakers in LA on Christmas Day. In the rematch at Boston (Lakers had just lost Bynum again), they were smoked again. Then, on February 19th, 2009, Garnett went up to receive an alley-oop during a game in Utah, and simply landed on his knee wrong. To this day, I have never heard an official name given to whatever happened to his knee that night. Naturally, I fully expected this to be Celtics antics, and Garnett to come out of the tunnel thumping his chest and talking trash to the likes of Kyle Korver by the end of the 3rd quarter. But Garnett never played another meaningful minute the rest of the year, and was on the sidelines (pounding his chest and talking smack) as the Celtics were dethroned by the Magic (and eventually had their crown taken by the Lakers).
Garnett returned this year and has struggled mightily. He has lost his explosiveness and has appeared to limp heavily at times. His team, lacking the night to night intensity that was generally supplied by Garnett for the last two seasons, struggled to the 4th seed in the Eastern Conference Play-offs. However, old (and the 2010 Celtics are definitely old) warriors with big egos sometimes don’t go quietly into the night, and the Celtics were able to oust the likes of Dwyane Wade, LeBron James, and Dwight Howard. Their reward? Kobe Bryant, the league’s alpha male, striving for his fifth ring in ten years. And for Garnett? He was matched up against his former whipping post from the 2008 Finals: Pau Gasol.
Many said a doppelganger for the series was going to be the Kevin Garnett-Pau Gasol match-up. Just how far had Pau come since getting dominated in 2008? Would he resort to the “Ga-soft” label he had been given by the media? Would Kevin Garnett be able to harvest Gasol’s organs once again? Whoever won that matchup would win the series, many analysts predicted.
Game 1, I (and anybody who knows basketball) would argue, went to Gasol. He dropped a 23-14-3-1-1 line on the same front-court that he struggled against in 2008. Garnett responded with a 16-4(!)-1 line, in which he settled for too many jump shots, didn’t rebound, and allowed the likes of Jordan Farmar to gracefully get to the rim. It was probably the biggest contrast between 2008 and 2010.
NEXT: What the future holds…
After Game 1, Pau had this to say about Garnett:
“On Kevin’s part he’s also lost some explosiveness. He’s more of a jump shooter now, you could say. Comes off the lane. Before, he had a really, really quick first step and was getting to the lane and he was more aggressive then. Time passes, and we all suffer it one way or another, but he’s still a terrific player, a terrific competitor, and he’s going to bring everything he’s got. You can count on that.”
As one of my favorite beat writers, Kevin Ding of the OC Register, noted, “It’s an unfortunate aspect of this business that reporters want athletes to say interesting things, and then anything that is interesting will be eagerly tried and used against them.”
While it’s a quote that carries a lot of truth and really can’t be construed as smack-talk, just somebody leveling their honest opinion (with some empirical evidence to back it up), it’s something that won’t sit well with Kevin Garnett. As I said earlier, old warriors with big egos don’t go quietly into the night. And Garnett could be a snake that feels like it’s been pushed into a corner. And that’s when they’re at their most dangerous.
Whether he intended to or not, Gasol has undoubtedly stirred an old dog that may need something like this to fully get him going again at this point in his career. Gasol has come to the cross-roads of his career. With the decline of Tim Duncan, and KG standing, literally, on his last leg, Pau Gasol can take the title of “Best Power Forward in the Game” from them with a dominant series.
If Garnett could some how rally the team around him, somehow get the reigns around Gasol, and capture his 2nd title in three years? Well, he certainly will have a valid argument for best Power Forward of his generation.
Both players, I’m sure, are aware of the stakes.
NEXT: Cementing their legacies…
Personally, I believe that if Kevin Garnett was in any position to do something about Gasol talking “smack”, he’d have done it during Game 1 of the NBA Finals. This is one of the fiercest competitors in the history of the league, a guy that poured every ounce of everything he had into every regular season game and play-off game alike. However, he’s a guy that routinely kicks people when they’re down, tries to start altercations and then throws his hands up in the air with the “I didn’t do nothin’” look on his face, and a guy that was a ring-leader of one of the most arrogant defending champions in recent memory. When you’re arrogant when you’re on top, people will applaud when you fall.
I believe Pau Gasol to be the best big man in the game today. He plays in Kobe’s shadow, is known as soft because he plays a European style of ball, but really, is there a more complete big man in the game today? If Pau Gasol can rise up and vanquish Garnett, a year after out-playing the more physically gifted Dwight Howard, how can you not say that Pau isn’t the best big man game in the game today? If he’s not, who’s better?
However, as LeBron James learned with Kobe this year, the King wears the crown until he is defeated in open battle. And The “Big 3”, when healthy, have yet to lose a play-off series. While Gasol has out-played Garnett this year and one game in the NBA Finals, Gasol must finish the job. He must leave no question at the end of this series that Garnett has been bested.
Then, and only then, will he truly shed his “Ga-soft” label and move into where he truly belongs: into the fraternity of the world’s best players.