Notes from an Intervention

Shoals speaking here. . .

Right at the buzzer, Dr. LIC put up an extremely bitter post decrying this championship. For those of you who only recently discovered FreeDarko, the Doctor is pure Twin Cities. He was around the organization pre-Garnett, and met KG the day the teen joined the team. Needless to say, he has some very complicated feelings about this. Still, I thought he was being way too subjective, so I took it down.

I also couldn't have had a more different reaction. When Garnett gave THE INTERVIEW, I had the sudden revelation that, wow, underneath this all he still really was the player I had such a strong affinity for. The Recluse was a little more cynical, wondering if KG hadn't become a caricature of himself, or at least had parts of that interview that were more contrived than others—like, he said, a guy holding an Oscar speech in his pocket. To me, though, that only heightened the "finally!" feeling of it.

But in the end, the three of us agreed that this is a tremendous relief for Garnett, even if we might've preferred it to have gone down differently, or with some other team. From his on-court past and from the tension of this season. But not from all of whatever pain lives inside him, since that's deeper than just winning and losing basketball games; he's an emotional athlete, not an escapist. But you probably didn't need us to tell you that, so let's just stop arguing about Garnett until next season.

Oh, and for all the issues I had with Dr. LIC's first outpouring, he did make one absolutely brilliant point: "I'm certified" was perhaps the first real show of arrogance in Garnett's entire career. And he waited till the only time he truly felt he'd earned that right.