Is Kevin Garnett a good predictor of long-shot MVP winners?
It seems we’re about to find out.
Speaking with Bleacher Report’s Jonathan Abrams, the retired NBA legend and current host of TNT’s “Area 21” had some high praise for the Milwaukee Bucks’ 20-year-old skyscraper:
B/R: You’ve done a lot of work with Thon Maker, right?
KG: Thon Maker reminds me a lot of myself. He loves the game. He’s a young, exuberant athlete who has a lot of tools—he has touch; he has agility; he has really, good feet. He has a really good shot from three-point all the way up to 19 to 21 feet. He has very good bones, as we say.
Thon is going to be the MVP of the league one day. Mark it down. He has the bones. He has the appetite to be able to chase something like that.
Okay then.
Garnett could merely be biased towards all big men he’s worked with. He did, after all, offer high praise for Karl-Anthony Towns, his former teammate and mentee with the Minnesota Timberwolves. At the same time, he didn’t call Towns a future MVP candidate—not in the article anyway.
Maybe that was implied. Or maybe Garnett just sees a lot of himself in Maker—pronounced, for the record, as “Mah-ker.” The 7’1″ tower does share a similar profile to the future Hall of Famer. They both entered the NBA on the more spindly side, with good range for their size, in their particular eras.
Will Maker ever be as strong or fiercely omnipresent as Garnett? We’ll have to wait and see. Right now, though, he’s just trying to remain in the Bucks’ rotation. He’s still getting consistent court time, but head coach Jason Kidd ripped him from the starting lineup in favor of John Henson, and his dipping field-goal clips won’t serve him well as the team tries to march up the Eastern Conference’s ladder.
