In return, KG shows Wolves what could be

By Steve McPherson

 It is simply impossible to undersell the hard thrum that began coursing through the Target Center when Kevin Garnett came charging out of the tunnel for the first time in 7½ years wearing a Minnesota Timberwolves uniform. If you knew nothing about Garnett's history with the team, if you were too young or not into basketball, you might not have understood it, but it was impossible to deny it as a felt thing within the arena.

With the four other starters introduced, the screen above the scoreboard fell black, the stands spiked with the stars of cellphones' flashes. Former NBA commissioner David Stern's voice poured out: "With the fifth pick in the 1995 NBA draft, the Minnesota Timberwolves select …"

And it hung there, Kanye West's "Homecoming" rising up into the silence as clip after clip of a young Garnett unspooled and the crowd spiked the tense silence with whistles. They were clips we'd seen perhaps hundreds of times: Garnett leaping on the scorer's table, dusting his palms with talcum, his teammates piling crazily on top of him. But stacked one on top of another, with Garnett waiting there in the darkness by the bench, it built into something towering. When fireworks shot out from the stanchions, it was practically redundant. The place was already on fire.

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David Sherman/Getty ImagesKevin Garnett's impact on the Wolves in his return went beyond the box score.

Of course, there was also a basketball game to play, and it did not start promisingly for the Wolves. Minnesota's first basket didn't come until more than five minutes had passed with the Washington Wizards up 13-1. They were, to put it simply, too keyed up -- both Garnett and the young players on the Wolves.

But almost inexorably, they began to pull it together. From the moment Garnett went to the bench, he was in the players' ears, from Andrew Wiggins to Adreian Payne to Gorgui Dieng. On the court, he shouted his teammates into place, and the Wolves defense took a noticeable step up, showing how much one player who knows how to show and recover can anchor the rotations of a whole team.

By halftime, Minnesota had pulled even with Washington at 42, and the second half began with a bang-bang play that had Ricky Rubio running off a Garnett screen, getting the ball back to him at the top of the arc, and Garnett threading a perfect pass to Wiggins cutting past a downscreen from Nikola Pekovic for a dunk.

Garnett contributed directly in these ways, plus brought in eight rebounds to go with five points, but it was his indirect effect on the other Wolves that stood out. Although they had to overcome that early tightness, once they got into the second half, they played hard without tensing up, with an edge. They cut harder, moved with purpose, snapped the ball, jumped out on screens -- all stuff they've been working on since training camp but with a new kind of energy.

It became clearer as they started to push out the lead in the second half of the second quarter. Going back at least to Rubio's sophomore season -- when Kevin Love began the season injured and never truly came back -- this team has been living too much in its head. The pieces -- Rubio's passing, Love's shooting and rebounding, Pekovic's immovability, Martin's scoring -- looked right on paper but struggled to jell on the floor. The team so far this season has flashed glimpses of a promising future, but it's also full of young players struggling to reconcile their innate feel for the game with all that they're learning.

But as smart as Garnett is on the floor, he lives the game farther down in his body, not even in the heart so much as the belly. Whatever he's sparking in these players, it's only just beginning, and there's no guarantee it won't falter or fail to sustain itself.

But in his first game back, he showed the Wolves' players and reminded the Wolves' fans that it's okay to want: to not just hit your marks and do what you're supposed to but in that moment to want to make the play so badly that you want it more than anything else -- to know that you can make that feeling happen when you need it.

This is the magic and the promise of Kevin Garnett. This is the possibility that the move to acquire him was not just fine or even good, but possibly brilliant.

There are many games to go. At 38 years old, Garnett is likely to miss several of them. The Wolves are going to lose a bunch of them -- they even need to if Garnett's return is truly going to lay the groundwork for future growth. They will, after all, need someone to replace him, and there are strong power forward prospects in this draft.

When the season ends, one win over the Wizards at the tail end of February is not going to look like much. It won't stand out amid the wins and losses, the final box score bearing nothing so epic as Mo Williams' 52-point outburst earlier this season or Love's 31-point, 31-rebound masterpiece against the Knicks in 2010.

But it's not a game that will be quickly forgotten by anyone who was there. For one night, the Timberwolves felt like a different team -- one that mattered, even if it was only to themselves. The trick, now, is making that change stick.