Everyone who played with Kevin Garnett has a story about his competitiveness and trash talks but this might be the funniest of them all.
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Although it didn’t last long, the Celtics-Lakers rivalry of the late 2000s is one of the greatest rivalries in the modern NBA. But that was building up way before that, even when those championship-winning players of 2008-2010 were playing for other teams.
Lamar Odom and Kevin Garnett were one of the duos that played for those Lakers and Celtics but had been going at each other for a long time even before that.
At the start of that decade, Garnett and Odom, the two most skilled big men in the league at the time, were both in the West playing for the Minnesota Timberwolves and Los Angeles Clippers respectively.
And an instance that Lamar remembers from that time reflects how competitive and simultaneously funny The Big Ticket was which was the base of his competitiveness.
Kevin Garnett used to get hard-ons during competitive NBA games
A 6-foot-11, 240 pounds of sheer muscle and venomous competitiveness, the Wolves’ big man wasn’t among the players who anyone in the NBA wanted to see at the rim or on the other side of the court whispering something in their ears.
The 12x All-Defensive Team member and 15x All-Star was also one of the greatest trash talkers of the game who went hard at anyone and everyone. But this one time he might have spoken too much about a hardness which was far too hilarious for a trash-talker of his calibre.
Listen to it yourself in Odom’s version of it, remembering the instance from back in the day when he and Darius Miles were playing for the Clippers facing KG’s Timberwolves multiple times in a season playing in the division.
Miles was nowhere close to the player Garnett was, still the 4x rebounding champ seeking a competition and firing himself up to get that dog out was a way for him, much like Michael Jordan, to get going.
And man, did he not put on a show on both ends of the floor whenever he stepped into the hardwood in his terrifically long and one of the most decorated careers in basketball history.