Kevin Garnett, by the Numbers

It was the free throws that haunted him. Kevin Garnett had played horribly in one of the biggest games of his life—Game 5 of the 2008 NBA Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers—a "garbage" performance by his own admission, punctuated by two missed free throws that could have tied the game with 2:31 to go. After enduring a five-hour ground delay at Los Angeles International Airport the next day, the team finally arrived back in Boston a little before 11 p.m. "I was pissed," Garnett says. "I missed those fucking free throws. That bothered me the whole trip." When the plane touched down at Logan, Garnett called a car service to take his family home. Then he headed to the Celtics' practice facility in Waltham.

An empty basketball court had always been Garnett's refuge from the critics who said his style of play—selfless to the point of being deferential—wasn't conducive to winning a championship. He had seemed strangely passive in the first four games of the series, and he'd given naysayers more fodder in Game 5 (one basketball writer opined that Garnett was a "fake franchise player," and another compared his record of postseason futility with that of Yankee Alex Rodriguez). Alone in the Waltham gym, he drained foul shot after foul shot.

By the time he finally went home, it was the morning of Game 6.

That night, before tip-off, Celtics coach Doc Rivers was concerned enough about Garnett to send assistant coach Kevin Eastman to check on him. Eastman, seeing the familiar death stare that is part warning to reporters (who by now do not need it), part meditation, reported back: "I think he's good to go."

And indeed he was. Late in the first quarter, with the Celtics trailing 10-8, Paul Pierce grabbed a rebound and pushed the ball up the floor. Garnett beat his defender, Laker power forward Pau Gasol, down the court and got into position under the basket. Garnett shucked Gasol to the ground, and Pierce delivered the pass from the top of the key for an easy lay-up. It was at once a subtle yet assertive move, and Garnett's teammates understood the significance immediately. "Our whole bench just exploded because we knew it was over," Rivers says. "On that play."

By the fourth quarter it was no longer a basketball game. It was Carnival on Causeway Street. The new Garden had become the old, cigar smoke filling the air. When the final buzzer sounded, Garnett had scored 26 points and grabbed 14 rebounds in a decisive 131-92 win. Though he rarely responds to his doubters, during a postgame interview with Michele Tafoya of ABC he couldn't resist yelling into the television camera, "WHAT ARE Y'ALL GONNA SAY NOW?"

It is a popular belief that Garnett secured his legend the day the Celtics capped their unprecedented one-season turnaround by winning the championship, a championship he and the team will defend beginning this month. But that's too easy. Garnett is a unique, even revolutionary, figure—the first high school player to go pro in 20 years, and three years later the owner of a massive contract that shook the NBA—yet he has a game as old-school as Bill Russell's. More than any other NBA star, Garnett has also been sold short by the narrow way greatness is defined for professional basketball players. Nothing about him changed in the 24 hours after his late-night penance in the empty practice gym—it's just that to appreciate the player he has always been requires an entirely new way of looking at him, and his whole sport.

 

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