Kevin Garnett Is Still Talking

In what wound up being the last question of the first post-game press conference of his second stint with the Minnesota Timberwolves, someone asked Kevin Garnett how his body felt after playing 20 minutes in a decisive Minnesota win.

"It feels like shit," he said, lightly slapping his large palms on the table in front of him as he stood up. A wry smile spread across his face, and the assembled media laughed, and that was it—a few long, quick strides past the throng and then Garnett had escaped into the quiet Target Center hallways.

He'd responded to questions openly for nearly six minutes, most of them having to do with communication. What did you talk about with your new teammates in the locker room after the win? How did the young guys on the team respond to the advice you gave them during the game? What were you feeling? What are you feeling now?

He talked about how it felt to be welcomed home by the fans who packed the Target Center, and straining to remember the proper name of a new teammate (everyone in the locker room goes by a nickname, he explained). A reporter asked what he talks about with young players during the course of the game, and he answered that, too. "Just boring basketball stuff," he said. "Y'all wouldn't understand."

Basketball is a game of numbers: the heights, weights, and salaries of the players; the accumulated box score stats and the advanced metrics that dominate front office thinking and shape fan debates; whether that was a three-pointer or two; the time left on the clock; the final score. The discussion about the greatest players of all time is governed by tallies of championship rings, and career milestones are defined by long, lofty numbers—25,000 career points, 10,000 rebounds, 5,000 assists.

Kevin Garnett stands seven feet tall, has made more than $200 million in his 20 seasons in the NBA, and he has hit each of the other career benchmarks listed above. He's been on 15 All-Star teams and 12 All-Defensive teams; he has won an Olympic Gold Medal, an NBA Title, and a league MVP trophy.

He's also 38 years old, and will be 39 in May, and is currently putting up some of the worst per-game numbers of his long and storied career: 6.8 points, 6.8 rebounds and 1.6 assists on 45 percent shooting from the field, in roughly half as many minutes per game as he played at his zenith. His "fairy tale" return to Minneapolis means playing on a team that entered Wednesday night just 12-43, the second-worst record in the NBA. These are numbers, too, although they don't really matter all that much.

This is because basketball isn't just a game of numbers. It is also a game of subtle things that resist quantification: cooperation, teamwork, motivation, the successful melding and sublimating of five on-court egos into something unified and somehow stronger and smarter. There is also the question of communication, which is where all those post-game questions on communication came from.

This is an area in which Garnett has not declined even a little bit. Garnett's mouth starts moving before the ball is tipped and rarely stops until the final buzzer sounds. He's infamous for his trash talk, which has inspired some of the most passive-aggressive "fights" in NBA history, but for the most part, he is communicating. For NBA bigs, barking out coverages, telling teammates where to be, what's happening, and what's coming next can be the difference between giving up a good shot or getting a stop. It's signal rather than noise, and it is something Garnett has done better—and louder, and more—than just about anyone, for a long time.

And he did this from the first moment of his second stint with the Timberwolves, harping on his new teammates mistakes, serving them unsolicited advice on the bench. His voice rose even over the buzz of a near-capacity crowd primed to erupt at his every move. Supposedly routine calls to guards of where picks were coming from sounded out like gunshots. He yelled emphatically and pointed to guard Kevin Martin to come help him trap an opposing ballhandler, and the team got a steal from it. In transition defense, he backpedaled into the paint while Ricky Rubio sprinted to the top of the key, ready to cut off a drive, and Garnett called out to let Rubio know just where he was, then touched his back to emphasize it.

When he was off the court, it was the same. During an early first quarter timeout, Garnett boldly placed his middle and index fingers under the drooping chin of new teammate Nikola Pekovic and then lifted his granitic chin up. It was the sort of thing you might do to get the attention of a disheartened child, except that Garnett was doing it to a mountainous new teammate—Pekovic looks like an Eastern European cousin of The Thing—in their first moments of working together. Animated words of encouragement and claps followed from Garnett, with Pekovic nodding along in agreement.

At the beginning of every timeout, in fact, as head coach Flip Saunders convened with his coaching staff while the players caught their breath on the bench, Garnett would hold court in front of the huddled team. He'd primarily focus on the players that had just come off the floor, giving passionate pieces of advice delivered via extra-strength body language. He pounded his fists on teammates' knees as they sat, pumped them up before the coach entered the huddle to offer his directives before the Wolves resumed play. The chatter continued during the 28 minutes of gameplay that Garnett spent on the bench, as he chatted up whoever sat next to him—usually rookie forward Adreian Payne or rookie guard Zach LaVine. He'd interrupt the conversations periodically to call out coverages, protest unfavorable whistles, and clap emphatically at hustle plays from his teammates. When a portly gentleman on the JumboTron ripped off his shirt to reveal "Welcome Home, KG" on his gut, Garnett laughed and made a gesture of acknowledgment. It was possible, as Garnett exhorted the crowd to "Get the fuck up" during an extended Timberwolves run, to see Garnett's future with the team stretching out for as long as he felt like raising his voice. Eventually, the talking would fully subsume the non-talking, but that would not necessarily be an ending.

Before all of that, before the clamoring fans and the pep talks during timeouts and the skull sessions on the bench, Garnett sat alone at the end of the bench as the entire arena went dark and silent, then erupted in cheers.

Basketball is a numbers game. One team scores more than the other and wins—it's that simple, and that complex. Garnett can't provide the Timberwolves what he once did where numbers are concerned. He is older, and not the scoring, rebounding, shot-blocking miracle that he once was. He is someone else, now, and does different things.

When it was time for Kevin Garnett to be introduced, David Stern's voice echoed through the arena. It was a playback of the night the Minnesota selected the 19-year-old Garnett out of Farragut Academy in Chicago. "With the fifth pick of the 1995 NBA Draft…" Shots of the impossibly young KG filled the screen, freshly decked out in a Timberwolves hat. Next came video of the dunks, blocked shots, a quick-cut montage of emphatic yelling and fist-pumping that suggested the way in which Garnett grew from a rail-thin teenager into one of the greatest players in the history of the game.

Garnett sat quietly through all of it, looking down at the floor. The introduction was long —"longer than I would have liked," Garnett admitted after the game—and as it wore on, he started moving. He shifted from side to side. He punched his right fist softly into his palm. Then he started talking. Saying a prayer, maybe? He was communicating something, someway, to himself and whoever could hear him. He was already doing his job.