In a surprising new rant, Boston Celtics and Minnesota Timberwolves great Kevin Garnett made some bold claims about the superstars in the NBA today.
Kevin Garnett will go down as one of the greats of all time not just for one, but two NBA franchises. During an iconic 12-year run in Minnesota, he turned the Timberwolves into a consistently relevant franchise in the league for the first time.
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Then in 2007, he was traded to the Celtics and became a core piece during an impressive six-year tenure that saw him finally win his first NBA title. The 15-time All-Star and one-time NBA MVP knows what it takes to win at the highest level. And he did it during the final vestiges of a more physical and hard-hitting era in the league.
That’s why, while he respects the stars of today, he doesn’t believe any of them — including Anthony Edwards and Jayson Tatum — could have been as good if they played in his day.
Kevin Garnett stats (Career): 17.8 PPG, 10.0 RPG, 3.7 APG, 1.3 SPG, 1.4 BPG
Kevin Garnett says Anthony Edwards wouldn’t be anywhere as good in his era
“I don’t think anybody in this generation could have played like 20 years ago,” Garnett said in a new edition of the “All the Smoke” podcast [h/t Hoops Hype]. “If I’m being 100, and this is to Ant, this is to everybody in our league — Tatum, all y’all — let me tell y’all something. Twenty years ago you couldn’t get to a triple step back. You couldn’t get to a triple step back.
“And then if you shot that [expletive], it had to go in. You know why? Because we had efficiency, back in the day it was so [expletive] hard. It was too physical, and guess what? The league had to come off of it for the flow of movement to be able to have scoring go up, which is why we like to sit here and watch kind of the rat race of the high-paced game right now,” he added.
The comments were in response to a recent opinion from Edwards claiming that outside of Michael Jordan, players in the 1990s and 2000s weren’t as skilled as they are today. The debate over which era and players has raged for decades and this is just another chapter in a classic NBA fan discourse.
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