The Weekside: The NBA won’t be the same without Kevin Garnett

Kobe Bryant retired. Tim Duncan retired. Now it sounds like Kevin Garnett might not be back.

The 40-year-old Farragut Academy product returned to the Minnesota Timberwolves at midseason in early 2015 to play out his final days on the team that drafted him more than 21 years ago. His time as a difference maker on the court were over, but he could be a mentor to the young players on a roster.

KG could be, to them, what Malik Sealy and Sam Mitchell were to him when he entered the league as an impossibly young 19-year-old at a time when few were in their teens.

Now that plan may be over.

The team is reportedly in buyout talks with the best player in franchise history. It has a new coach, Tom Thibodeau, who is in a dual role as general manager. Who knows the rationale behind not wanting Garnett back in the locker room. But it’s Thibs’ team now, and he, quite understandably, may want to move on.

It’s hard to be the dominant voice when Garnett is around.

There isn’t much use in recapping KG’s accolades, accomplishments, and talent. If you don’t understand by now how much he has brought to this game and how unique he is, then you aren’t ever going to understand.

Mostly it’s just sad.

There were hopes that he could be the next Michael Jordan, a former player to buy a team. He doesn’t have cashflow like MJ, naturally, but the idea was for KG to perhaps be the face of an ownership group that would center around him and Flip Saunders.

Flip coached Garnett on the best teams the Timberwolves have ever had. And after coming back to coach the team again in 2014, after almost a decade elsewhere, he wanted to reunite with KG. He convinced his former All-Star forward to waive a no-trade clause to get the band back together in Minneapolis.

The previously rudderless franchise had young future stars, Garnett, and a coach to help them grow.

Then Flip died.

KG was devastated. Whatever plans the two had in the works were gone, and now an aging player had to grapple with loss of his coach, co-leader, and friend.

It’s no surprise that Flip’s sad death changed so much. But it being the catalyst for KG retiring from the league stings in that odd fan part of the brain that, while being trivial in comparison to real life loss, still does exist.

He could take a buyout from the Timberwolves and spend one final season somewhere else. Boston might be the logical choice, but that team has moved on. The banner from 2008 still hangs and a legion of fans still love him. But the organizational links, outside of Danny Ainge, are gond.

Another player might be likely to end up on the Golden State Warriors.

That doesn’t seem like a KG move.

The KG move seems like retirement.

We really might lose Garnett in the same summer we lose Kobe and Duncan.

The void will be mammoth. KG has been a lot of things during his long tenure in the NBA. Kevin Garnett is the best of us and the worst of us.

He has paid a career-long homage to his friend Malik Sealy, who died tragically in a car accident during KG’s formative years in the league. His work ethic is uncanny, his dedication to his craft abnormal. He is among the few who seems to leave it on the court every game in a sense that isn’t a cliché. His head butting of the basketball support before each contest is real, a nightly moment of isolation used to harness the limitless intensity that improbably flows through his skinny frame.

He also butts heads — with opponents and teammates alike. He called Charlie Villanueva, a hairless alopecia sufferer, a cancer patient to degrade him. He has surely said worse that didn’t make headlines. He picks on small players while rarely confronting anyone his size. He is a bully. He made Glen Davis cry. He cut off Ray Allen as a friend after he decided to take another job.

And he apparently doesn’t have a great relationship with new Wolves coach Tom Thibodeau, an odd realization to learn since they are the two men who established the identity of an iconic team that won a ring.

You would think that those two would have a special, unbreakable bond built by combining to make defense and togetherness the lasting legacy of the 2008 title team in Boston. Garnett arrived to the Celtics, changed the culture, and got everyone on the roster to fully buy in to the revolutionary defensive system designed by a then-unknown Thibodeau.

If KG hadn’t been such a powerful force in that locker room and so hungry to bring his peerless defensive abilities to the front of a championship squad, Thibodeau would never have risen quite like he did. Tom’s is a genius mind that would have been recognized in time regardless. He would have gotten to be a head coach eventually.

But 2008 was special. It was special enough, we were told and believed, that it feels shocking that the two don’t have mutually beloved ties to this day.

But KG isn’t a typical guy. He doesn’t always maintain typical relationships. He is, and has always been, one of a kind in what he has brought to this sport.

It is odd how one man — a Kid really — can feel like part of the old era when he was was in many ways the person who ushered in the modern era.

But KG has often been a contradiction.

Some things are undeniable, however.

Nothing has been the same since Kevin Garnett entered the NBA.

And the game won’t be the same without him.