Instead, Isiah Thomas finally landed his high school prospect in Toronto after willingly passing on Kevin Garnett and Kobe Bryant. He sensed that he had purged his roster of enough misfits and malcontents to allow a high school player to develop and grow. “Had Garnett come that first year, I don’t know if he would have had as much success as he had in Minnesota, and if Kobe would’ve come that second year, those guys’ careers would’ve been totally different than they turned out to be,” Thomas said. “We didn’t have the infrastructure to really support what they were bringing to the table as young high school players.” Thomas interviewed two prospects in the middle of June who could not have come from more disparate backgrounds, but represented the draft’s fast-changing face. Adonal Foyle was a 22-year-old academic All-American from Colgate University. His guardians taught at Colgate. McGrady, meanwhile, was a teenager who attended the meeting with his agent and AAU adviser fresh from signing his huge Adidas deal. Thomas informed them that he would draft McGrady if he lasted until their ninth pick. On draft night, Thomas was shocked that the Bulls declined the offers to move up and selected McGrady, while deflecting trade offers. “He reminded me a lot of George Gervin at that time in terms of his ease, in terms of being able to always get it done very easily without looking like he was working too hard to do it,” Thomas said.
McGrady smiled warmly as he met Canada’s media the next day. The Raptors ensured that McGrady would at least have familiar food at his introductory press conference. They held it at a downtown Toronto steakhouse. “He’s an exceptional talent, a great kid, and I think all of Toronto is going to look forward to knowing him in the years to come,” Thomas said at the beginning of McGrady’s introductory press conference. “And I must say he’s a fine dresser, too.” Thomas motioned to McGrady, clad in a black shirt and a bright yellow suit. He had celebrated his selection until the early-morning hours and admitted to being tired after traveling. “I’m glad I hung around to the ninth pick to be here in Toronto,” McGrady said to the media. “I thank Isiah for picking me for this team. I think I’ll enjoy my career here.”
The initial Toronto trip proved brief. McGrady spent most of the summer in California and a good portion with Kobe Bryant, coming off his rookie season. Bryant had purchased a six-bedroom hilltop house in the affluent neighborhood of Pacific Palisades. The manor offered a glistening view of the Pacific Ocean, an indoor Jacuzzi, Italian marble floors, a pool, and six bathrooms. Joe Bryant had quit his coaching gig at La Salle. He, Pamela, and their daughter Shaya moved into the house with Kobe Bryant. Bryant’s other sister, Sharia, stayed in Pennsylvania for her senior year at Temple. “He held his own, won the Slam Dunk Contest,” McGrady said of Bryant. “He was not as successful as he wanted to be his rookie year and I wasn’t either…It was a work in progress for us.” McGrady stayed a couple of weeks at Bryant’s home—the two were not just linked through basketball, after all, but also to Adidas and Sonny Vaccaro. The teenagers trained and watched plenty of karate movies. Between films, Bryant advised McGrady to remain patient early in his career and his playing time would follow. Bryant spoke from his own experience. His rookie season landed flat if judged by the lofty predictions that Joe Bryant foretold to John Nash and John Calipari.
With his white-topped head and glasses, Del Harris looked more the part of a science professor than an NBA coach. But he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the game. Harris worked his way up to coach the Lakers after beginning as a high school coach in Tennessee. In the NBA, he had spent time coaching Moses Malone, Bill Willoughby, and Joe Bryant. Harris had quickly burst Kobe Bryant’s dreams of immediate stardom and success. He told Kobe that he had joined a quality team that had just gone 53–29 and added Shaquille O’Neal. They were built to win then and not develop players by spoon-feeding anyone playing time. Besides, the Lakers already possessed Eddie Jones, a soon-to-be All-Star, at Bryant’s position. Any minutes Bryant received would have to be earned.
“You decided not to go on to college, but to join a man’s world and I will be treating you like a man and not a kid,” Harris said to Bryant. “You will be dealt [with] like the other players with the same expectations. We already have a good team and you will have to earn playing time. We are going to try to win every game. The other players will be watching to see if you get special treatment and will resent it if you do, because this is a competitive business and playing time is essential in it. They will respect you more when they see that you have earned what you get. You have a chance to be great, but you will not be able to be a starter on the team until you knock out a starter. You will not be given the decision on a draw.”
Bryant nodded knowingly, not at Harris’s words, but in his belief that he could usurp any starter. “It was not as easy as he expected,” Harris said. “Still, he worked hard and never doubted [himself].”
Wrist and hip injuries prevented Bryant from playing in the Lakers’ 1996–1997 season opener against the Phoenix Suns. Bryant made his NBA debut against Garnett and the Timberwolves, of all people and teams. Garnett served as a barometer for how far a high school player could progress within one short year. He quickly jumped from being developed slowly by Bill Blair to being pushed to the forefront by Flip Saunders. Garnett started the final half of his rookie season averaging 14.0 points and 8.4 rebounds. He scored a season-high 33 points in a late-season game against Boston, while playing 43 minutes. Afterward, he placed his arm around Saunders. “Coach, thanks for believing in me and trusting me and playing me that much,” Garnett said. “Believe me, son, you’re going to be playing a lot of minutes in this league,” Saunders responded. That fall night, a Sunday, at the Great Western Forum in 1996, Garnett played 39 minutes in front of pockets of empty seats and spent much of his night being bullied by Shaquille O’Neal. Bryant, meanwhile, subbed for Cedric Ceballos, becoming the youngest player to appear in an NBA game at 18 years and 72 days old.
Bryant’s mind moved faster than his body. He tried driving the lane the first time he touched the ball and traveled. Officials whistled Bryant for playing illegal defense a couple of possessions later. Garnett reminisced about how painfully slowly that aspect of the game had come to him. Cherokee Parks got a finger on Bryant’s lone shot attempt of the night, a three-pointer. Bryant returned to the bench a few minutes into the second quarter. The score tightened and so did Harris’s rotation. Bryant remained on the bench for the rest of the game as O’Neal helped the Lakers pull away. “It was a struggle for him because he knew that he had this exceptional talent,” Jerry West said of Bryant’s early professional days. “In practice, he would do a lot of things you see him doing today, but he made so many mistakes. From a team perspective, mistakes kill you. It was never talent with him, it was just finding a way.”
The Lakers did not own their own practice facility and held training sessions at various colleges and gyms. That caused Bryant’s development to stagnate at times, Harris said. “Kobe did find places to work out on his own, but had he had a facility where our players could have been coached beyond the two hours we had rented at any one of the four to six different sites we used during any given season, he would have progressed even faster,” he said. Still, Bryant did little beyond play, practice, and think about basketball. He did not go out on the road carousing, let alone deal with his teammates much at all outside the gym. Some viewed him as aloof, but even those players gave him the ball at practice once they saw what he could do. “He was very individually orientated and he isolated himself,” said Kurt Rambis, a Lakers assistant coach. “He didn’t assimilate himself with his teammates and team at that young age. But his talent level was clear and there were no ifs, ands, or buts about that. Once you saw him compete against men, you could see that the sky was the limit with him. He was obsessed.” In a time before DVDs, Bryant frequently traveled with video of Michael Jordan’s highlights. “He never paid attention to any outside activities that I could tell,” Harris said. “The flight attendants could have been topless for all he cared. He
never looked at them.”
But the games ran into one another, dragging on. Bryant’s minutes had still not increased enough for his liking. He would receive five minutes one game and maybe seven the next. The Lakers kept winning and Harris refused to alter his lineup. In a moment of mounting frustration, Bryant told Harris at one practice that he could beat anybody in the league one-on-one if Harris would just clear out the post for him.
“I’m not going to move Shaq out of the low post so you can go one-on-one,” Harris said. “That day will come, but you cannot beat guys one-on-one at a high enough percentage for that moment to be now.”
Bryant proved he could dazzle a crowd in February. At Cleveland’s Gund Arena, Bryant played center stage at All-Star Weekend without even earning an invitation to the marquee game. Bryant poured in 31 points in the rookie All-Star Game. Allen Iverson was named the game’s MVP with his 19 points and 9 assists as boos cascaded down from fans who thought Bryant deserved the award. He captured the slam-dunk contest by rotating the ball through his legs and tomahawking the ball through the rim. The dunk brought Julius Erving, the contest’s innovator, out of his seat.
Bryant’s talent was undeniable. Harris slowly started increasing Bryant’s playing time. By the end of the regular season, Bryant had become one of his first substitutions off the bench.
The Lakers cruised past Portland in the playoffs’ first round, advancing 3–1 in the best-of-five series. Bryant sparkled in the third game with 22 points. A veteran Utah team awaited the Lakers. Behind John Stockton and Karl Malone, Utah quickly jumped to a 3–1 lead in the best-of-seven series. Meanwhile, Bryon Russell stifled and harassed Bryant. The Lakers appeared primed to unravel at any moment. O’Neal was a force inside, but Harris and his point guard, Nick Van Exel, engaged in a heated argument near the end of Game 4.
The series reverted to Utah for the next game, with the momentum awarded to the aggressor. The Jazz sprinted to lead by as many as 16 points in the third quarter before Van Exel charged a comeback, dizzying Stockton with his drives to the basket. The Lakers gained possession with 11 seconds remaining in the game, tied 89–89. Harris motioned for a time-out. Van Exel, he thought, would be the logical choice for a final shot. He had the hot hand, having already scored 26 points. Harris knew and believed that Van Exel could shake Stockton for a decent look at the basket.
He decided to gamble. Harris thought Bryant could free himself for a better shot. Hit or miss, we win or tie, Harris thought, but Kobe will know his coach had confidence in him to give him that shot in his rookie year. Either way, he will benefit from it.
Bryant received the ball near the right elbow, with Russell shadowing him. The 14-footer felt good off his hands, but fell far short. The overtime session proved worse. Bryant lofted up two more air balls from beyond the three-point arc and the Lakers succumbed to Utah, 98–93.
As they walked back to the locker room dejectedly, Shaquille O’Neal stopped Bryant. They huddled for about 15 seconds and O’Neal later said that Bryant was the only player on the team who wanted to take those crucial shots.
“Tonight, I just didn’t come through,” Bryant told reporters. “But play the game again and I want the ball again.”
Most teenagers would wonder why a coach would entrust them with the season on the line at that pivotal moment. Not Bryant—even after failing. Rambis was an NBA veteran who had been in drag-it-out playoff contests many times over the years when his Lakers played Boston. He knew the look of a player who shied away from shots in a game’s waning moments. “You never saw that in Kobe,” Rambis said. “It was almost indifference. It was like, Yeah, Fuck it. You just knew that it wasn’t going to bother him.” Had the Bryant heroics actually happened, they would not have changed much. A new, younger guard had yet to topple the league’s old power. The Bulls still dominated the NBA. Jordan’s champagne swig and cigar puff had become something of an annual tradition that continued into the summer of 1998 with another championship, in spite of Chicago’s internal strife.
8.
Silence loomed a couple beats too long for Eric Fleisher’s comfort. Fleisher had phoned Kevin Garnett in the fall of 1997 to notify him that an agreement on his contract extension had finally been consummated. The Timberwolves were set to hand Garnett, at a time when he would have been midway through college, the most lucrative contract not only in basketball but in all of sports. All Fleisher needed was Garnett to come to his hotel and sign the contract before the deadline. They had just one hour.
Garnett finally responded. He was at the Lake Minnetonka home of his friend, music producer Jimmy Jam. They were busy.
“We’re listening to Janet’s album,” Garnett said. Jam was previewing a copy of Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope for Garnett. “Could we do it a little later?” he asked Fleisher.
Fleisher sighed. He wasn’t surprised that he faced one more hurdle in finalizing an extension where talks had occasionally turned acrimonious and frequently went cold.
“It was pretty clear how good he was and, even more importantly, how good he was going to become,” Fleisher recalled. “The important part of understanding that deal is that it came a year in advance of him becoming a free agent. It was strategically timed because the collective bargaining agreement was coming to an end a year later. Nobody knew what the new rules were going to be, but it was a safe bet that they were going to be significantly more prohibitive and restrictive than the current collective bargaining agreement, so it became a timing issue. In my mind, it was absolutely imperative to do everything possible to try and push for an agreement the summer before and the only way to do that was to have a great deal of leverage. It’s hard to have leverage when you’re not a free agent.”
Negotiations between Fleisher and Glen Taylor, Minnesota’s owner, and Kevin McHale began in July. Garnett’s development had continued its acceleration during his sophomore season when he faced a rookie Kobe Bryant. Garnett averaged 17 points and 8 rebounds, guiding Minnesota to its first playoff appearance in franchise history. His potential had blossomed into productivity. Garnett would be paid. The question remained how handsomely. He was a marvelously gifted athlete who practiced mercilessly to better himself. Still, he had yet to make a true dent in the league. Garnett would become next in line to benefit from talent and, more importantly, timing. Before him, Michael Jordan had certainly prospered from his gifts and drive. He also benefited because of the period when he played. Jordan received economic endorsement opportunities unavailable to players only a few years his elder, like Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. Likewise, Tracy McGrady’s Adidas contract came not only because of his promising future, but also because of external factors—the success of Garnett, the popularity of Bryant, and the burgeoning shoe war to lure the best, youngest stars. Conversely, Scottie Pippen gambled at the wrong moment by accepting a long-term contract before salaries exploded. He continued as the league’s poster boy of an athlete and his agents misgauging time and opportunity. “What we want to avoid with Kevin is that he doesn’t find himself in a situation Scottie Pippen is in, where he’s in a contract in which he’s vastly underpaid,” Fleisher said to the Minneapolis Star Tribune in the fall of 1997.
Fleisher knew that timing would be crucial in brokering a deal before the labor agreement between the league and the players union expired in the summer of 1998. The NBA tried correcting a broken system in 1995 when rookies held underperforming teams captive so the rookies could land large contracts. They closed that loophole with the implementation of the rookie wage scale but, in doing so, created another giant, gaping problem. Rookies could become unrestricted free agents after three years in the NBA and the league had no salary ceiling on individual players. Teams had to deliver huge extensions to their rising stars, trade them away, or risk losing them to free agency for nothing in return. Eight of the top 10 picks of the 1995 draft (Joe Smith, Antonio McDyess, Jerry Stackhouse, Rasheed Wallace, Damon Stoudamire, Shawn Respert, Kurt Thomas, and Ed O’Bannon) were traded early in
their NBA careers. Losing Garnett would be disastrous for the Timberwolves and possibly fatal to the franchise’s future in Minnesota. Minnesota possessed no history, no brand, and little following. The mere possibility of Garnett leaving offered Fleisher the leverage he needed. If the sides could not reach an agreement by October 1, Garnett would play out the final season of his rookie contract and become a free agent, allowed to sign with any team that could afford him.
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