June 20th, 2008 DKCMan
If you knew Kevin Garnett’s life, you’d know why he was speechless but could not stop talking.
“Man … man … man.”
It’s what a man says when he can say nothing but wants you to know just how it feels after his life’s search has been completed.
The same way he didn’t say anything before the game when his coach went to search him out to possibly share a moment. The same way he couldn’t speak, then screamed “Anything’s possssiiibbbblllleeee!!!!” and broke down when Michele Tafoya interviewed him on the court immediately after the game. The same way he couldn’t say anything else to the greatest Celtic ever as the two embraced on the floor except, “I got my own. I got my own.”
It’s those speechless moments for a man who can’t stop talking. Those are the ones he’s been waiting for.
He breathes. Exhales. “I just want to say, other than my kid being born, this has got to be the happiest day of my life right now.” He says a few more things. Things about not sleeping for a week, things about changing his cell phone number so no one can find him. He breathes out once again. Bows his head.
“Man … man … man.”
And this is how the end of this chapter of Kevin Garnett’s life begins.
Was he waiting for this moment or was the moment waiting on him?
The moment that will eventually define a career that has placed him not only in conversations about Bill Russell but in conversations with Bill Russell. The moment when he was able to shed all the talk of what he couldn’t, can’t and won’t do on the basketball court. The moment when he showed us that he can come up big in big games, put games on his shoulders and not defer to teammates, win when questions swirl about whether he’s one of the best we’ve ever seen or just a taller, more skilled version of Scottie Pippen. The forever a No. 2 player, but not a No. 1.
It was that moment when he could answer all of the doubters, who for 13 years have believed — since he first drove around Chicago, too young to get into bars, in an Audi with the license plate that read KG PICK 5 — that he was less than the elite player he was being sold to the world as.
“You don’t understand what this moment means to him,” said Jimmy Jam, half of the famed record-production tandem Jam and Lewis, a friend who embraced KG when he first arrived in Minnesota. “On so many levels this is more than just being a world champion. He’s a ‘we’ guy. This is about everything that is good about basketball. This is about the basketball gods that are looking down on this and saying, ‘It’s time for Kevin.’”
As the walkway between “media-can-go-no-further” and Moet showers got crowded, KG hugged Brian Scalabrine as if they were depending on each another for oxygen. Brian Scalabrine!
As he watched this moment, Jam said, “For me personally, it’s almost like watching one of my sons. … From the time Kevin walked up to me in the parking lot of a grocery store and stopped me and introduced himself and asked me, ‘How do I conduct myself in Minneapolis? How do I handle this? How can I be the next Kirby Puckett?’ … Watching this is unbelievable.”
It’s the difference in being an emotional leader and a team’s leader, which always gets lost when Garnett’s legacy is discussed. And what got lost this season in us finding KG — outside of watching him give the same amount of love to a teammate who didn’t make the Finals roster as he did the man who won the Finals MVP — was how we cannot make him someone we want him to be.
All season long and most evident in these last six games, we so desperately wanted him to be more dominant, less passive, more like Sam Cassell in a crucial fourth quarter than Tracy McGrady. Throughout the Finals, doubts and statements about him “not posting Pau Gasol up all day and puttin’ in work” found more airtime on sports talk radio than Cialis spots. “Expect Great” became an inside joke as a slogan he had loaned to the WNBA.
Expect great. That’s the stigma that had been placed on him, one he had yet to overcome in many hearts and minds. And one that he’s had to live with. Until this moment in his life. When he could finally let the world know what it felt like to be Kevin Garnett.
You may not have seen that moment. It wasn’t when he came out of the locker room before the game, before the rest of his teammates, to get his 90 seconds of alone time before his band of brothers entered the stage. It wasn’t the play he made with 47.5 seconds left in the first half when, fouled by Lamar Odom and falling to the floor, he made that Julius Erving-esque one-handed shot. It wasn’t about how he lay on the court after that foul with his fist slightly pumped in the air, a picture many writers in the press box felt was the defining moment of his career.
It wasn’t found in his teaching Big Baby Davis during the game how to guard Gasol while Gasol stood right there next to them, or when he dove for a loose ball one play later, or how he capped a 13-4 run with a bucket in the lane the play after that, or when he stood under the basket on a dead ball waiting for Paul Pierce to shoot free throws and put his head on referee Joey Crawford’s head and talked to him in a way no other player in the league could because no ref would listen to any other player the way they listen to KG. It wasn’t in the 26 points and 14 rebounds he ended with in the greatest game of his life.
No. The moment that Kevin Garnett had been searching for his entire career came while his team, everyone from Doc Rivers to P.J. Brown, sat on the front of the stage singing Queen’s “We Are The Champions.” He sat between Big Baby and PX2 with the championship trophy in his hands. He closed his eyes, as if to block out everything around him, and said a few words to the trophy. Then he kissed it. He put his head on it. Then kissed it again. And held it there.
Five seconds later, it was over. That was his moment. And if asked he’ll tell you that single moment with that trophy was all he ever wanted from this career. And in the most chaotic scene seen in Boston basketball in 22 years, he found a way to have that moment. Surrounded by 20,000 other people. All by himself.
But Kevin Garnett wasn’t asked that question.
He was asked about his soul in front of a room full of media with a gold championship basketball next to him. After one last “Man … man … man” left his body.
After he had unabashedly let his emotions go in screaming to the rafters, after he had lost himself after the win, his inner kid released itself. He explained what it’s been like to be that active, hyper, ever-moving, ever-talking person who had to suppress himself to win the title. What it’s like to finally let it all out. To explain what it feels like to finally let this out of your soul.
His analogy revealed who he really is: still the kid. The beauty and innocence of what this game is supposed to be about when money, power and disrespect are not the guiding forces in your life. His answer, one of the ageless. One for the ages.
“You ever go to school,” he said, finding the perfect words, “and you had a bully mess with you every day? I know everybody ain’t no tough guy here. It’s like that bully that you go to school every day [with] and you know when you get out of your mom’s or dad’s car, you know you’re going to see him as soon as you walk through the doors, he’s sitting there waiting to pat your pockets and mess with you. Then one day you say, ‘This is going to stop today!’ You walk in and as soon as the bully pats your pockets you lay his ass out and you see the expression on his face. You’re sorta shook because you know what, you just knocked the bully out and you don’t know how he’s going to come back. The next morning when you come in and he’s not there, it’s like a sigh of relief. It’s like getting rid of the bully. It’s like I knocked the bully’s ass out! I knocked his ass clean out. That’s what it feels like. For all y’all who ain’t been bullied, y’all got no idea what I’m talking about. But for y’all who have, you understand my story.”
I think, now, we finally do.
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June 20th, 2008 DKCMan
With Russell and Havlicek sitting courtside, and Red surely lighting up a victory cigar somewhere, these Boston Celtics returned to glory like the great teams before them.
Dominant in every way.
On a new parquet floor below aging championship banners hung in the rafters two decades back, the Celtics won their 17th NBA title and a first one—at last — for Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen—their Big Three for a new generation.
After 22 long years, the NBA has gone green.
Lifted by ear-splitting chants of “Beat L.A.” early and cries of “Seven-teen” in the closing seconds by their adoring crowd, the Celtics concluded a shocking rebound of a season with a stunning 131-92 blowout over the Los Angeles Lakers in Game 6 on Tuesday night.
“It means so much more because these are the guys, the Havliceks, the Bill Russells, the Cousys,” Pierce said. “These guys started what’s going on with those banners. They don’t hang up any other banners but championship ones.
“And now I’m a part of it.”
With the outcome assured, Boston fans sang into the night as if they were in a pub on nearby Canal Street. They serenaded the newest champs in this city of champs, and taunted Kobe Bryant and his Lakers, who drowned in a green-and-white wave for 48 minutes.
Garnett scored 26 points with 14 rebounds, Allen scored 26 and Pierce, the finals MVP who shook off a sprained right knee sustained in Game 1, added 17 as the Celtics, a 24-win team a year ago, wrapped up their first title since 1986.
Rajon Rondo had 21 points, eight assists, seven rebounds and six steals as the Celtics, who built a 23-point halftime lead and obliterated the Lakers, who were trying to become the first team to overcome a 3-1 deficit in the finals.
They didn’t stand a chance.
Boston’s 39-point win surpassed the NBA record for the biggest margin of victory in a championship clincher; the Celtics beat the Lakers 129-96 in Game 5 of the 1965 NBA finals.
In the final minute, Pierce doused Celtics coach Doc Rivers with red Gatorade. Owner Wyc Grousbeck, who named his group Banner 17 to leave no doubt about his goal, put an unlit cigar in his mouth—a tribute to Auerbach, the patriarch who had a hand in the franchise’s first 16 titles.
Garnett dropped to the parquet and kissed the leprechaun at center court and then found Russell, the Hall of Famer who taught him the Celtic way, for a long embrace.
“I got my own. I got my own,” Garnett said. “I hope we made you proud.”
“You sure did,” Russell said.
Rivers pulled Pierce, Garnett and Allen with 4:01 left and they shared a group hug with their coach, who was nearly run out of town last season. Rivers lost his father at the beginning of this remarkable run, a season no one expected.
By the time Rivers was handed the Larry O’Brien Trophy, it was June 18—his late father’s birthday.
When the game clock reached zeros, Rivers reflected on his dad.
“My first thought was what would my dad say,” Rivers said, “and honestly I started laughing because I thought he would probably say, if you knew my dad, `It’s about time. What have you been waiting for?”’
It’s was Boston’s first title since the passing of Auerbach, whose presence was the only thing missing on this night. Even Auerbach, who died in 2006, got some satisfaction. Led by Rivers, Auerbach’s beloved team denied Lakers coach Phil Jackson from overtaking him with a 10th championship.
The Boston-Los Angeles rivalry, nothing more than black-and-white footage from the 60s and TV highlights of players wearing short shorts in the 80s to young hoops fans, remains tilted toward the Atlantic Ocean. The Celtics are 9-2 against the Lakers in the finals.
Boston missed its first crack at closing out the series in Game 5, but the Celtics didn’t miss on their second swing, running the Lakers out of the gym.
Bryant, the regular season MVP, finished with 22 points on 7-of-22 shooting.
He started 4-of-5 from the field and seemed intent on forcing a Game 7. But he missed seven shots in a row and everywhere he went, L.A.’s No. 24 ran smack into a wall of Boston defense as high as the Green Monster.
“They were definitely the best defense I’ve seen the entire playoffs,” Bryant said. “I’ve seen some pretty stiff ones and this was right up there with them. The goal was to win a championship, it wasn’t to win MVP or anything like that, it was to win a championship.”
Garnett and Allen were All-Stars in other cities, stuck in Minnesota and Seattle, respectively, on teams going nowhere. But brought together in trades last summer by Celtics general manager Danny Ainge, a member of the ‘86 Celtics champions, they joined Pierce and formed an unbreakable bond, a trio as tight as the club’s lucky shamrock logo.
They resisted being called The Big Three, a nickname given to Larry Bird, Kevin McHale and Robert Parish two decades ago.
“This is the reason we came here,” Garnett said. “This is the reason we got together, and Danny made it go down. This is it right now.”
With Garnett scoring 17 points and Pierce adding 10, Boston built a 58-35 halftime lead, and unlike Game 2 when they let the Lakers trim a 24-point lead to two in the fourth quarter before recovering, the Celtics never stopped.
They pushed their lead to 31 in the third, and with Boston still up by 29 after three, plastic sheets started going up in the Celtics’ locker room in preparation for a champagne celebration.
No team had to work harder for a championship than these Celtics, who were playing in their record 26th postseason game after being pushed to seven games by Atlanta and Cleveland before taking care of Detroit in six to win the Eastern Conference title.
They entered Game 6 slowed by injuries as Pierce, Kendrick Perkins (shoulder) and Rondo (ankle) were less than 100 percent. There was also uncertainty surrounding Allen, who stayed behind in Los Angeles following Game 5 after his youngest son became ill and was diagnosed with diabetes. The Celtics needed three planes to get back from L.A. and didn’t get home until late Monday night.
But there were no excuses, and just as they had while winning 66 games during the regular season, the Celtics got plenty of help from their bench as P.J. Brown, James Posey, Leon Powe and rookie Glen “Big Baby” Davis came in and contributed.
It was a group effort by this gang in green, which bonded behind Rivers, who borrowed an African word ubuntu (pronounced Ooh-BOON-too) and roughly means “I am, because we are” in English, as the Celtics’ unifying team motto.
The Celtics gave the Lakers a 12-minute crash course of ubuntu in the second quarter.
Boston outscored Los Angeles 34-19, getting 11 field goals on 11 assists. The Celtics toyed with the Lakers, outworking the Western Conference’s best inside and out and showing the same kind of heart that made Boston the center of pro basketball’s universe in the ’60s.
House and Posey made 3-pointers to put the Celtics ahead by 12 points and baskets by Pierce, Garnett and Rondo put Boston ahead by 18.
In the final minute, Garnett floated in the lane, banked in a one-handed runner and was fouled. His free throw made it 56-35, and after Perkins scored, the Celtics ran to the locker room leading by 23.
On his way off the floor, Garnett screamed, “That’s that.”
And so it was.
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March 30th, 2008 DKCMan
After dropping two straight games, the Boston Celtics have now won two straight games, over the Phoenix Suns, and the New Orleans Hornets. Next up for the Celtics, the Miami Heat. Oh boy, that should be interesting. The Celtics will come into the game with a NBA best record of 57-15, while the Heat will come in with a NBA worse 13-59. Will the Celtics run it up? Will the bench a few guys? What will the Vegas line be on this one? I say Boston -19. I’d take the Heat, because I dont think the Celtics will run it up, and K.G. will sit for a lot of the game. After Miami, the Celtics will travel to Chicago, host Indiana, and then go back on the road to Charlotte, and Milwaukee. The Celtics have already clinched the #1 seed, and home court advantage through the entire Eastern Conference playoffs, and are now playing to clinch over the West. Currently Boston leads New Orleans(49-22), San Antonio(51-23), LA Lakers(49-24), Phoenix(49-24), and Houston Rockets(49-24). Really only a win or two will clinch the home court, then the boys can rest a bit.
If the playoffs started now, in the East the eighth spot would fall to the Atlanta Hawks, who are 32-40. In 9th place New Jersey sits at 31-43, only 2 games back, while Indiana is also only 2 game back with a 30-43 record, and Chicago sits in 11th place with a 29-44 record, 3 games behind Atlanta. Atlanta trails 7th place Philadelphia by 4.5 games, so most likely it will be Atlanta, New Jersey, Indy, or Chicago to face the Celtics.
Our boy, Kevin Garnett is having another MVP type season. He comes in scoring 19 points a game, grabbing 9.5 rebounds a game, 3.5 assists per game and 1.3 blocks per game.
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March 27th, 2008 DKCMan
Celtics’ big man Kevin Garnett, along with Hornets guard Chris Paul were named the Eastern and Western Conference Players of the week, for the games played Monday March 17-Sunday March 23. This is the second time both of these players have won this award this year.
Kevin led Boston to a 3-1 week, and became the first team since 2001 to sweep the Texas Triangle, of Dallas, Houston and San Antonio. Garnett scored 22 points, grabbed 11 boards, and had 3 steals in the 94-74 win over the Rockets to break their 22 game winning streak. During the week K.G averaged 20.5 points, 11 boards, and 2 steals.
Here is a recap of K.G’s week:
March 17 @ San Antonio: Collected 21 points and eight rebounds in a 93-91 victory over the Spurs.
March 18 @ Houston: Tallied 22 points, 11 rebounds and three steals in a 94-74 win over the Rockets.
March 20 @ Dallas: Registered 20 points, 13 rebounds and three steals in a 94-90 win over the Mavericks.
Congrats to our boy K.G.! Keep it up the last few weeks of regular season baby!
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March 19th, 2008 DKCMan
Kevin Garnett says he would vote for Paul Pierce for NBA MVP this season.
I got Paul for MVP this year,” said Garnett, who won the award four years ago with Minnesota. “He does a lot of things, just little small things that people don’t see. There are only three people I like to watch on offense, and he’s one of them, man. He makes scoring look easy. He has an uncanny confidence about him that I love, cockiness and self-assurance.
“I told you, there is a reason why I came here. He’s one of the reasons”
Now come on K.G.- we love your teammate P.P. just as much as you do. But MVP? First of all, K.G., you ARE the MVP, and if it’s not you, you know Kobe, LeBron and T-Mac have alot to say about it. Just win the NBA title K.G., and no one will care who MVP was!
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February 6th, 2008 DKCMan
Our guy, Kevin Garnett is unlikely to return for his Minnesota reunion Friday night at the Target Center. Sidelined by an abdominal injury, it appears K.G. will remain seated.
Garnett has been out since January 25th, in the win over the Wolves at the Boston Garden.
The Celtics can afford to sit KG, with an 11.5 game lead over the Raptors in the division.
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