3 In The Key: The Inherent Fear of Miami, The Big Asterisk, Where is Shawn Kemp now

1. Identity crisis in Miami

Last week, Lebron James likened himself to Tim Tebow: “I love to see what a guy can do when his back is up against the wall and everybody counts him out. I’m in that same boat sometimes.”

Funny because Lebron’s perception of how the public views him couldn’t be further from the truth. No one has ever counted him out, despite his repeated disappearances in crunch-time and failure to win that first championship.

Lebron and Tebow are actually complete opposites. We focus on everything Tebow can’t do, and are completely surprised when he does anything outside the realm of our limited expectations for him. On the opposite side of the coin, we know that Lebron can do anything he wants, and that’s why we react everytime he comes up short at anything.

And what this level of expectation creates is an inherent fear that Lebron and the Miami Heat are always on the verge of putting it all together. Forgotten amidst all our criticism is that this team was two wins from the championship in their first playoff run.

The individual talents on this team overshadows what is essentially a team that’s poorly constructed and reliant on their top players. But when their top player is the greatest talent in the game, perhaps everything else doesn’t matter.

When Miami is dominant like they were on opening day against Dallas, we wonder how anyone can possibly compete with this team. And even when they slump with three straight road losses like in the past week, the inherent fear remains that they’re so close to putting it all together.

The Heat will always disappoint us until their ultimate goal is reached. But along the way, the fear that the dominant team we expect to see will become reality makes them a fascinating study of how perception is so easily altered by our expectations.

2. The Big Asterisk

It appears as though Kevin Garnett’s career will end with an asterisk next to his resume.

Since joining the Celtics and winning a championship with the team in his first year, he’s earned the reputation as a fugazy: a phony tough guy who will pick on anyone, talk trash even when he’s not playing, and even accused of calling another player a cancer patient.

This storyline runs contrary to who he was in Minnesota, where he became one of the few to make the successful transition from high school to the pros. He made the Wolves a relevant franchise, and was the superstar we all sympathized with: doing all that he could in a losing situation for over a decade. As basketball fans, most of us were thrilled to see him finally get out of the first round with the help of Sam Cassell and Latrell Sprewell.

This is also the same guy, who in his prime, along with Chris Webber and Tim Duncan, put up stats on a nightly basis that redefined the power forward position. And though he was often faulted for shrinking in the big moments, he delivered a huge Game 7 performance against the Sacramento Kings in his only prolonged playoff run with the Wolves, and was the best player on the court in the series-clinching win over the Lakers in 2008.

So why has Garnett’s on court behavior deteriorated so much in recent years? The explanation is simple if you’ve followed his entire career.

If there’s a signature trait that we can associate with Garnett, it is his mental approach to the game: his intensity and focus on the court is matched by few.

Being on the court is almost an out of body experience for Garnett. He becomes a different person, he’s so embedded in the action that it’s bound to result in confrontations. And with his diminishing skills on the court, he can only impose so much of his presence with just his game. To a factor on the court, the intimidation tactics allows him to compensate what he’s lost as a basketball player.

For over a decade, this approach helped him become one of the best players in the game. Now that he’s on the decline, it’s become a flaw that threatens to change the way we’ll remember him.

But I hope we can all at least reach an understanding of what basketball means to Garnett, and how he’s always been consistent with his approach towards the game. It doesn’t absolve him of his behaviour, but it at least allows us to form a full view of his career and appreciate the body of work of one of the best power forwards of this generation.

3. Shawn Kemp, Mentor

We’ve all heard the jokes about Shawn Kemp. The once dominant power forward who soared above the rim on a regular basis, became over-weight, fathered too many children, and left the game with a stained reputation.

But at age 42, Shawn Kemp appears to have turned things around. In this Pro Basketball Talk article, Kemp is profiled as a mentor for Philadelphia 76ers center Spencer Hawes.

The Reign Man now lives in Seattle, is married, owns a restaurant called Oskar’s Kitchen and has dropped 55 pounds since retiring. He’s now the same weight as he was during the peak of his career.

Sports Illustrated will be doing a feature on Kemp in the near future, be on the lookout as it’s always nice to see my favorite players from the 90s doing well with life after basketball.