Remember when Kevin Garnett stated (with seeming confidence) that Thon Maker would be an MVP one day? Why the heck would he say something like that? I know that being an all-time great doesn’t automatically give your basketball-related opinions any credence (see Magic Johnson), but it should at least give you enough awareness that you can reliably identify which players might turn into MVP’s and which won’t.
At this point, Maker’s ceiling is to stay in the league as a seventh man for five to ten years. He’s not going to sniff even an All-Star game, much less an MVP trophy, by averaging 11/6 per 36 with more turnovers than assists, even if his defense somehow became otherworldly, which it definitely isn’t right now. Maybe, MAYBE, if a team played him thirty minutes per game and he did nothing but hunt for blocks, he could trick the powers that be into letting him onto an NBA All-Defensive team. Maybe. Probably not.
I can’t take Garnett seriously about anything anymore, basketball-related or not basketball-related. Even if he was just giving crazy quotes to the media to boost Maker’s confidence, he shouldn’t have been throwing around terms like “MVP”. Was he just fooled by Maker’s ability to hit threes and do post moves in a mostly empty gym? Did he get Maker and Giannis confused? Was his next quote “Giannis needs to work on catching the ball and putting on some muscle or he’s gonna get traded to a trash heap like the Pistons sooner than he thinks?”
It’s not Maker’s fault that a hall of famer called him an MVP in the making. As this game showed, he can still do okay things sometimes, but his role on the team has been supplanted by Christian Wood, for good reason. I’m still kind of rooting for him, if only because the longer he stays in the league, the less of a bust he becomes, and I don’t want the Bucks’ legacy to be drafting an endless series of busts (Joe Alexander waves hello. Rashad Vaughn waves as well. But Vaughn could still be good damn it)