On Friday morning, the Minnesota Timberwolves announced the day that Kevin Garnett’s jersey is finally going up in the rafters.
February 28, 2027.
This will be just the second game after the All-Star break on a Sunday evening. The Wolves will play host to the team that first retired KG’s number (#5), and where he finally won a well-deserved championship, the Boston Celtics. He hasn’t been shy about how much the Celtics have meant to him, so one will have to wonder which team he’ll be rooting for that night.
Is it possible he sits courtside dawning an abomination of a jersey like this?
All jokes aside, this jersey retirement is 10 years overdue. Had it not been for his long standing feud with former Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor, number 21 would have been up at Target Center right between the late Malik Sealy’s #2 and the Flip Saunders banner. The energy will surely be electric that night. You better believe that once single-game tickets go on sale, they’ll be scooped up immediately.
For those of you who were asleep for the last year, it was formally announced in December 2025 that new Timberwolves owners Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez were bringing Garnett back into the organizational fold. He would be coming aboard in a role on the business, community, and content side of the team. KG would also soon return to Target Center for a Timberwolves game for the first time in eight years, walking into the arena to a raucous standing ovation alongside his daughters.
KG’s jersey retirement ceremony will surely be filled with lots of emotions and special guests, but surely not many dry eyes.
Until then, I leave you with one of my favorite videos on YouTube. It’s a carefully curated 11-minute long pictorial video created by garnetttribute, detailing his career (until that point) backwards. It starts hitting me in my feels around the 7:55 mark. So many memories resurface in my head not just of KG, but my life around that time.
We’ve come a long way.
