Kevin Garnett’s talent for badmouthing during his playing days was so strong that Rockets center Steven Adams told Garnett not to speak English during his first NBA season to avoid his wrath.
During Adams’ rookie season with the Thunder in 2013-14, Adams faced Garnett, then with the Nets, and was the first to suggest that the Hall of Famer couldn’t speak English.
The New Zealand-born Adams recalled in an interview with “The Morning Shift” this week that Garnett and then-Thunder big man Kendrick Perkins began to get verbally abusive towards each other.
Adams then walked in, and when Garnett started to badmouth Adams, Adams told Garnett, “Your English is no good.”
“Thankfully he didn’t say anything afterwards. He would have ruined me. I would have cried,” Ms Adams told the show.
“I wasn’t confident, and I wasn’t going to let him beat me,” Adams says at the start of the video, “because he’s a big talker.”
While Adams may have escaped Garnett’s wrath, the 15-time All-Star heard about the story and responded lightheartedly on social media.
“Ha! I’m gonna catch him at the old head run at LA Fitness.” Garnet wrote to X Wednesday night.
When he appeared on “All the Smoke” in 2020Garnett explained some of the strategy behind his trash talk.
“I always say when you say something bad, you need to back it up,” Garnett said. “The first thing to do when you’re saying something bad is to actually think about who it is that you’re saying it to and whether or not that person has the ability to back it up when I actually interact with someone.”
“If you get to a point where you exchange bad words and then you don’t even talk anymore, that’s the worst thing,” he added.
