It starts, of course, with him leading the new wave of preps-to-pros players in 1995 when he became the first high school player in 20 years to enter the draft. Kobe Bryant and Jermaine O’Neal followed the next year, and the trend was quickly established. Every subsequent draft had at least one high school player taken in the first round until the NBA put a stop to the practice in 2005.
By then, Garnett had already extended his influence in other ways, most notably when the league came to a halt in 1998 in the first missed games for a work stoppage in NBA history. That lockout marked the culmination of the owners’ extreme reaction to his $126 million contract with the Timberwolves. Fearful of signing players to deals that exceeded the value of their franchises, the owners held the line in negotiations until they added maximum player salaries to the collective bargaining agreement.
That salary ceiling held the line at the top end, but it also paved the way for the formation of superteams in the free-agency era. With the disparity reduced between what the home team and suitors could offer, it both reduced the financial incentive for Garnett to stay with the team that drafted him and enhanced teams’ salary cap wherewithal to add superstars (since an already-present superstar would occupy a smaller portion of the cap).
Then, of course, Garnett’s willingness to leave Minnesota and join the Boston Celtics was the start of the modern arms race in the NBA. Having two players in their prime and on their way to the Hall of Fame was no longer enough. Now it had to be three.
And it wasn’t just that Garnett moved — it’s that he went to the Eastern Conference. Would LeBron James have felt the need to leave Cleveland in 2010 if the Celtics of Garnett, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen had not defeated the Cavaliers in the playoffs twice in three years?
Maybe LeBron would have come closer to a championship — or won it all — on his own and would have never felt the need to leave in the first place.