In their initial meetings, Fleisher relayed the importance of a long-term bond between Garnett and the Timberwolves. He pointed out how much more in endorsements Garnett would earn by playing in bigger cities like Los Angeles and Chicago, instead of Minnesota. Glen Taylor was a self-made millionaire and a former state senator who earned his fortune through his printing business. He led a group that purchased the NBA franchise for $90 million in 1994 out of fear that another ownership group would relocate the team to New Orleans. The Timberwolves, to him, represented a source of civic pride, and the responsibility for the team’s success and rewards for its failures were to be shared throughout the organization. Taylor originally suggested to the Star Tribune that he was unwilling to give an enormous salary to just one player. He bemoaned the increasingly soaring salaries across the NBA. Shaquille O’Neal had just signed a humongous deal with the Lakers. Alonzo Mourning and Juwan Howard had also both recently signed contracts that topped $100 million. “That doesn’t make sense,” he told the paper in July 1997. “You have twelve players, five coaches, sixty people in the franchise doing the work to keep it going and you can have one or two people so out of proportion. That bothers me about the whole league and where the league is going. We had more players last season by far making five million than ever before. But, on the other hand, we had more players at the minimum salary. That doesn’t make sense, even for the players, that one player should take so much more salary that they have to surround that player with other players at lower playing skills.”
Taylor eventually came to his senses. Garnett was the organization. He wanted to keep him. He figured Garnett wanted to stay. Why waste time? The Timberwolves opened the bargaining with hopes of ending it swiftly. Taylor offered a contract extension worth a whopping $103.5 million over six years. “We made sure that this one was even more than [Shaquille O’Neal’s],” Taylor told the Star Tribune. “We did that so that he, his agent, and everybody else could say that we made the biggest offer. We thought it would give him and his agent some leverage, where people could say, ‘They really did a super job.’ ”
It was a great offer, an otherworldly one. Fleisher had negotiated most of his life. Anyone who brokered a trade in an elementary school cafeteria knew never to accept the first offer. A better one always loomed around the corner. “Even though we had had all kinds of dialogue prior to the first offer and even though it was a very, very significant, precedent-setting first offer, it was still their first offer,” Fleisher said. They declined, holding out for a contract they hoped would stretch upwards of $120 million. The entire franchise was worth only $127 million, according to Financial World magazine. The declining of the initial offer shocked Taylor, but it also upset the league’s veteran players, establishing a chalk line within the NBA fraternity. It served as confirmation that this younger generation of players had not scrapped and clawed before striking it rich, as the players before them had. They had received too much too soon, without any sacrifice, and gained the fruits of others’ labor. Pippen had played underpaid for years, lifting Chicago to championship after championship. What had Garnett done beyond nudging Minnesota to one playoff’s swift exit? “Don’t give the guys who don’t deserve it the money,” said Charles Barkley, the outspoken veteran forward. “How about that? When Kevin Garnett was offered twenty million and he turned it down, I wouldn’t have given him a contract on principle alone. What right does he have to turn down twenty million?”
His words echoed similar thoughts throughout the league. Beyond Garnett, the initial prep-to-pro players experienced growing pains while assimilating into the NBA. Yet, they were still multimillionaires. Bryant, while spectacular at times, was often regarded as cocky by his elder peers. He carried the confidence he gained when Harris awarded him those shots at the end of his rookie season into his second. Bryant more than doubled his scoring average and, although he was a sixth man on the Lakers, was voted to start the 1998 All-Star Game. He became the youngest All-Star in NBA history and occasionally matched up against Michael Jordan under Madison Square Garden’s bright lights. Jordan was 34, battling the flu that night, and fairly certain he was in his final season and making his last All-Star appearance. It came in an arena that, as a visitor, he had transformed into a second home. New York fans appreciated the game’s beauty and, for them, Jordan with the ball was like Mozart at the piano—no matter how many times Jordan had placed a dagger and twisted it into the heart of their beloved Knicks. In 1995, Jordan established a scoring record in the arena with 55 points. Back then, Bryant was just a high schooler fresh off referring to him as “Mr. Jordan.” In 1998, fans and media speculated about whether the All-Star Game would mark a passing of the torch. Bryant wanted to be master instead of apprentice that night—time, talent, and waiting in line be damned. Midway through the third quarter, Jordan faked a shot along the baseline, ducked under Bryant, and scored. Bryant responded with a beautiful flip of the ball into the basket on the baseline. “He came at me pretty early,” Jordan told reporters of Bryant. “I would if I was him. If I see someone that’s maybe sick or whatever, you’ve got to attack him. He attacked. You know, I liked his attitude.” Jordan took 23 points, the MVP trophy, and the win. Bryant scored a team-high 18 points and wowed the crowd at times. That was the good. With Bryant in those early days, his growing pains ensured that a dose of bad accompanied the positives. Bryant had infuriated Karl Malone during the game. Malone was also 34, and the evening marked his 11th straight All-Star Game. Malone arrived to set a pick for Bryant and establish himself in the post as he had done a million times for John Stockton, his Utah teammate. Bryant did not even look at Malone. He simply waved Malone away, caught up in the game. “Malone was so incensed that he said he didn’t ever want to play in another All-Star Game if he was going to be chased out of the post by a kid,” Del Harris said.
Meanwhile, Bryant’s contemporary Jermaine O’Neal could only dream of appearing in an All-Star Game. O’Neal had joined the NBA the same year as Bryant and spent the first 17 games of his career on the injured list, waiting, watching, and wishing he was still the man, as he had been just a year ago. It seemed as if he had just begun to grasp one set of plays when the coaching staff came up with new ones. He had wanted to lift his mother from poverty. He did. He thought he had been ready for the NBA. He was not. He signed his first contract before turning 18 and moved to Portland with his brother Clifford and his cousin LeVar. “If I had it to do over again, I would have thought about it a lot more and I would have gone to college,” O’Neal told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1997. “There’s a lot of other things than basketball you have to deal with. Mentally, I think the NBA is a little too much for seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds to deal with…I miss the college experience. In high school, I was able to do whatever I wanted to do. There weren’t that many big bodies or guys bigger than me to play against. Now I’m up against a lot of bigger, stronger guys, and I’m lacking that experience of playing against guys like that…[Kevin Garnett] kind of opened the doors for guys like Kobe [Bryant] and me. I just thought I would be able to do it. Now that three people have done it, everybody thinks they can do it. It’s going to take one person to fail for everybody to realize that everybody’s not ready for the NBA.” O’Neal recently recalled the experience of trying to break into the NBA at such a tender age. “I was very blessed to go to an organization like the Portland Trail Blazers, who really were prepared to draft an inexperienced, immature, underdeveloped high school kid,” he said. “I was every bit of that—you had guys pick me up from the airport right away. They always made sure they had people around me. If I needed to talk to a therapist, they had that in place. The city took to me like I was their adopted child, so it was perfect for me. Obviously, I didn’t get an opportunity to play my first four years as much as I wanted to, but it was a perfect chance for me to go and really develop not only physically, but emotionally and mentally.”
Tracy McGrady began his NBA career in much the same way as he arr
ived on the league’s radar in the first place. The Toronto Raptors trained at Buffalo’s Erie Community College in the fall of 1997. Doubts still coursed through his body. “Up until that point, I really never played against any NBA talent,” McGrady said. “Then once I got to training camp and it was just all NBA guys and I was holding my own, I was like, Oh, shit. We’re good.” McGrady drove the baseline during one scrimmage and tomahawk-dunked over Sharone Wright. “It was one of the nastiest dunks nobody ever seen,” said Damon Stoudamire, McGrady’s teammate in Toronto. Darrell Walker, Toronto’s coach, decided to end practice after the dunk. It was all anyone could talk about. “It was one of the most incredible things I have ever seen,” Walker said. “I’ve been in the league a long time. I’ve played against Michael. I’ve played against Dr. J. I’ve played against some high fliers and that was just unbelievable.”
That moment, for a while, provided the highlight of McGrady’s early NBA career. A left ankle sprain hindered McGrady’s debut. He seldom saw the court once healed and when he did, he played erratic minutes. Walker told him that he would not unseat any of the veterans in front of him. McGrady no longer even had Isiah Thomas as a mentor. Thomas’s attempt to purchase more of a stake in the franchise failed and he resigned to become a television commentator. The Raptors slogged through the season, at one point losing 17 straight games. “Adapting from being the man in high school to not really playing at all was difficult,” McGrady said. “I played ten, fifteen minutes one night, then I probably wouldn’t see the court for two or three games. It was a lot of adjustments that I had to really adapt to and then my coach—he was tough. He was an old-school guy. He felt like I wasn’t working hard enough and any little show-off thing that I did, I got benched for it.” Walker requested meetings with each of his players after Washington thrashed Toronto on New Year’s Eve. In the meeting with McGrady, Walker relayed his doubts as to whether McGrady would make it in the NBA. He called McGrady a floater and said the team was sick of him coasting by. “The problem that I had with Tracy was his work habits,” Walker recalled. “We clashed about that. That definitely hasn’t been a secret. I was on him because I saw so much in him, but also saw that if he didn’t put in work, he had a chance to be out of the league.”
Glen Taylor only concerned himself with one prep-to-pro player: Kevin Garnett. Hoping to gain public support and possibly reach Garnett (Fleisher had made sure Garnett was unavailable to Minnesota management and dispatched him back to Mauldin and Fleisher’s home in New York’s Westchester County), Taylor made the generous offer known to the public. “Glen felt people were questioning him on what kind of deal we were putting out there,” McHale told reporters. “If Glen Taylor doesn’t have the right to make a statement—he’s the owner of the team and we made a good offer—who does?” The disclosure infuriated Fleisher, who declared that Garnett would play the final season of his current contract in Minnesota and not entertain their offers the following summer when other NBA teams could and would bid for his services. “It was totally contradictory to what we discussed when we sat down the first time,” Fleisher said. “It was a decision that they made at the time because things didn’t go the way that they had hoped. They had made a very, very significant offer and it was an offer that was rejected, which they didn’t expect.”
The sides went weeks without any dialogue and barreled toward the deadline. Taylor did not want the organization to start from scratch. He began to come around on Fleisher’s demands. Fleisher convened with Taylor, McHale, Flip Saunders, and Rob Moor, the team’s president, the day before the deadline. They agreed that too much of the negotiations had unraveled in the media. Everyone had Garnett’s best interest at heart. Garnett attended the final two hours of the meetings and Taylor discussed with him the pressures an enormous contract would place on him and the responsibilities he would inherit in becoming the franchise’s face for the long term. McHale loved Garnett. Still, he advised Taylor not to extend such a lucrative contract to him. Not only did he worry about the precedent in allowing a young, talented player to hold that much leverage over a small-market team, but he worried about the burden that accompanied the deal. “It’s such a huge contract,” McHale told Taylor. “It’s going to be a game changer in the NBA.” Taylor responded that the organization could not afford to lose Garnett. “I was really afraid of that contract,” McHale recalled. “I just didn’t know…I know his agent’s job is to get him every last nickel, which they did, but I was uncomfortable for Kevin with that contract just because I knew all the stuff that would come with it. A lot of my feelings were Kevin-driven, like, man, this is going to be a hard thing for a young guy to live up to.”
In the hours leading up to the deadline, Taylor decided to offer Garnett a contract extension for six years, $126 million, an offer that sent shock waves through the NBA. “Kevin, you need to come over now,” Fleisher insisted after Garnett told him he wanted to listen to Janet Jackson’s album. “The deadline is almost here and this needs to get signed.”
“OK,” Garnett said, leaving grudgingly to make history.
The signing was major news in Minneapolis. Reporters had staked out Garnett’s brief appearance at the meeting a day earlier. A helicopter hovered above them as they left Fleisher’s hotel and made their way to the arena to sign the contract. Garnett had not spoken to the media in months. “I told my agent that my comfort level was in Minnesota and that is where I wanted to be,” Garnett said in the conference announcing the deal. “You know, it is not only about money. I hope people understand that, even though I turned down the first deal…Money doesn’t always make you happy. It solves some problems. But mentally and sometimes socially, it’s not everything.” This was supposed to be a joyous day for the franchise. Instead, it felt as though they had been hostages freed from captivity. “All the Bulls had to do was to sign Michael Jordan for about $2 million for next year and then make it up the next season,” Taylor told the Star Tribune. “Once they signed Garnett, [the Bulls] could then pay Jordan any amount the next year because you are not limited in what you can pay your own players. Denver is in a great position from a salary cap position. They had the money to sign Garnett.” Heat coach Pat Riley simply told Miami’s media that Garnett “got paid out of fear.”
The contract sparked an uproar. Garnett made $2.1 million in 1997–1998, the final year of his rookie contract, before his salary jumped to $14 million the following season. Teams and players targeted him. Garnett’s demeanor did not change. “I was never concerned,” Flip Saunders recalled. “Kevin was never a guy that money was going to change what he did and how he prepared and played on the court. I wasn’t really worried about that being an issue. From the league’s perspective, I mean, that was what the league was about. If you could pay guys, you pay them. There wasn’t a max on what guys could make. Did it change the league? Yeah, but it probably changed the league from a perspective of everyone, probably for the best.”
The NBA arrived at a crossroads and threatened to implode. The league had never been more popular or marketable, thanks largely to Jordan’s crossover appeal. His feathery jumper over Utah’s Bryon Russell in the 1998 NBA Finals appeared to be a fitting final image of him as a player. Jordan leaned toward retirement and would leave few heirs to walk in his air as the league’s new face. A series of television deals had recently netted the league $2.6 billion, but rising player salaries threatened to negate any profit. The league locked out its players in the summer of 1998, with NBA owners clamoring for more economic restrictions on contracts. Garnett’s deal became a rallying cry for most owners. Taylor defended himself. Other owners turned irate that a relatively new owner from a small market could so easily influence the entire league. “I feel no fault for the lockout,” Garnett said to the media. “It’s all about how you take advantage of the options you have once they’re given to you.” Washington Post sportswriter Tony Kornheiser categorized the rift as an argument “between tall millionaires and short millionaires.” He was wrong. Twelv
e majority owners were billionaires. They were adept businessmen and few derived the bulk of their earnings from professional basketball. They united in wanting to curtail salaries and prepared to lock out the players for the long haul.
“I think the league was building up to that point and [Garnett’s contract] was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” McHale said. David Stern and Billy Hunter, the executive director of the players union, both refused to budge. “We had gotten ourselves into a spiral where it didn’t matter what somebody had actually done,” Stern said. “It’s not about Kevin. It’s about other players who say there’s a pecking order. If somebody thinks that he’s as good as Kevin Garnett, then all of a sudden he’s being underpaid, undervalued, underappreciated, and you wind up having an unhappy and underproductive player. And that’s a bad thing. So we were trying to bring some more order.” As fall turned to winter, the NBA hurdled toward becoming the first major sports league to lose an entire season because of a labor dispute. Both owners and players suffered losses that totaled in the hundreds of millions of dollars. In early January 1999, nearly 200 players packed into the GM Building on New York’s Fifth Avenue. Stern had rejected the union’s latest proposal. Hunter put the owners’ offer to the players who opted overwhelmingly, 179–5, to accept the deal just hours before the owners would vote on whether to cancel the rest of the season. The sides scrambled to cobble together a shortened season of 50 games that birthed new governing rules. The players had acquiesced to the majority of the demands from the owners. The NBA became the first major sports league to cap individual player salaries and introduced the limits on a sliding scale. Players with less than six years of NBA experience could not sign a contract worth more than $9 million in its first year. Players with existing contracts could re-sign with their current team for a contract similar to their previous deals. A player would be subject to the new rules if he signed with another team. The agreement also lengthened the time a team controlled the rights of a drafted player before he could enter free agency by granting organizations an option for the fourth year and the right of first refusal the following year.
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