Is Kevin Garnett the GOAT of the Last 30 Years — or Just the Best Defensive Player?
Who’s the best player of the past 30 years?
Ask people, and the name you’ll hear most often is LeBron, followed by — in no particular order — Shaq, Kobe, Duncan, Curry, and Jokić.
All of these players have won multiple NBA titles and/or MVP awards. That’s generally how we distinguish the greatest players.
But another superstar belongs on the list. In fact, he might be recognized as the GOAT of this era if the chips had fallen a bit differently.
Enter Kevin Garnett.
Advanced stats show Garnett’s impact in a more accurate light
The 2025-26 season will mark 30 years since the NBA play-by-play era began — we have this data going back to 1996-97, the second year of Garnett’s career.
With play-by-play data, we can build out 29 seasons (so far) of Adjusted Plus-Minus (APM). This metric uses lineup data: points scored for and against to estimate a player’s impact on his team’s point differential, adjusting for the strength of his teammates and the state of the game.
To determine the best, most impactful players over those nearly three decades, we’ll use a multiseason version of APM. When APM is calculated over a short time window, the outcome can be noisy. But since we’re using 29 years of data, that becomes less of an issue.
Using this measure, Garnett ranks as the second-best player of the last 29 years, just behind LeBron.
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For his career, Garnett was selected to the All-Defensive Team 12 times, and won Defensive Player of the Year once — that’s stellar, but short of the four DPOYs that Mutombo, Wallace, and Gobert each won.
But determining defensive impact accurately has been an elusive task for award voters, especially before the proliferation of plus-minus stats.
According to xRAPM, there are several seasons in which Garnett’s defensive impact was estimated to be significantly higher than that of the DPOY winner. It wasn’t just that he rates as *by far* the best overall defender of the past three decades — he also had the highest peaks, year after year..
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By far the biggest reason that Garnett isn’t recognized among the very greatest of his generation is that he was drafted by the Minnesota Timberwolves — taking the Big Ticket No. 5 in 1995 was, unfortunately, one of the only things the Wolves got right during this era.
While he was trying to pull Minnesota out of the doldrums almost single-handedly, his competitors were teaming up: Shaq had Kobe and later Dwyane Wade; Kobe had Shaq and then Gasol; and the Spurs were loaded, as were the Heatles.
Quick: Name KG’s great Timberwolves teammates.
If you said Sam Cassell and Latrell Sprewell, then you are talking about a pair of journeymen who played exactly two seasons in Minnesota — and in one of those seasons, 2003-04, Garnett led the Wolves to the West finals.
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Ultimately, the situation was so bad that people started wondering if Garnett was a championship-level star.
Then in 2007, the Wolves traded KG to Boston for five players and two unprotected first-round picks — and Garnett, Paul Pierce, Ray Allen, and Rajon Rondo immediately won 66 games and the NBA title.
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