Tempers flared at the end of the Clippers’ 110-105 win over the Timberwolves Monday night. The weirdest incident involved Austin Rivers — coach Doc Rivers’ son — and Doc’s former player, Kevin Garnett. They ran into each other during a stoppage in play with 3:23 left in the game when Chris Paul called a timeout. KG pointed at the younger Rivers and mouthed off at him.
Doc said with a smile after the game, “I thought Austin should have punched him, personally.”
Austin had a different take after the Clippers had clinched the win and said KG had been messing with him even before the incident:
“He elbowed me in my head, and that’s not going to fly, really,” Rivers said. “I have all the respect in the world for him. He’s one of the best players to ever play the game, but at the end of the day, I’m a man just like he is, and that’s all there is to it.”
Rivers said Garnett was physical with him the entire game before they both received technicals in the fourth quarter.
“I let it go, and then we went and I didn’t have the ball, and he just hit me in my stomach and knocked the wind [out of me], and Chris [Paul] threw me the ball, and I wasn’t prepared for it because I had just lost my wind, and I threw it back to him,” he said. “The play went on and just because I bumped him a little bit, he turned around and did all that stuff.
Everyone talks about what a fake tough guy Kevin Garnett is, or has become, and messing with his former coach’s kid falls right in line with complaints we’ve heard about The Big Ticket from earlier in his career.
The biggest was KG only ever picked on rookies, or foreign-born players.
Austin isn’t a rookie, but he was only 15 when his Pops took Garnett (the 2008 Defensive Player of the Year that season), Paul Pierce and Ray Allen to a title with his team-first philosophy of Ubuntu.
We’re guessing Garnett still thinks of Austin as the star-struck teenage son of his former coach, and took the bump as a sign of disrespect. Not that KG is any stranger to disrespecting opponents.
We love KG, specifically how much emotion he pours out on the court. But he did slap Timmy upside the head like a punk that one time:
