Kevin Garnett Announces Retirement

SATURDAY, 4:14pm: The Wolves have waived Garnett, tweets Shams Charania of The Vertical.

4:50pm: Garnett will indeed be retiring from the game, Marc Stein of ESPN.com reports (Twitter link). The veteran posted a video to his personal Instagram account announcing his intentions.

3:46pm: The Wolves are going to waive Garnett in a move similar to what the Spurs did with Tim Duncan this summer, Jon Krawczynski of The Associated Press reports (via Twitter). This will allow Garnett to collect his full salary he was due for 2016/17.

FRIDAY, 2:53pm: Kevin Garnett and the Timberwolves have reached an agreement on a buyout, according to Kent Youngblood of The Star Tribune, who reports that the future Hall-of-Famer won’t play out the second and final year of his contract with the team. A league source tells Youngblood that Garnett is expected to officially make a retirement announcement soon.

[RELATED: Nikola Pekovic won’t play for Wolves this season]

A Wednesday report first suggested that the Wolves and Garnett were nearing an agreement on a buyout that would remove him from the roster. The 40-year-old had been under contract through the 2016/17 season and was owed an $8MM salary this year, but there has been uncertainty for the last several months about whether or not he’d want to continue his career.

Having spent 12 seasons in Minnesota earlier in his long career, Garnett returned to the Wolves at the 2015 trade deadline, agreeing to waive his no-trade clause in order to reunite with Flip Saunders, who was the club’s head coach at the time. KG signed a two-year deal with Minnesota that offseason, but lost his strongest ally within the organization before the start of the 2015/16 campaign, when Saunders passed away.

If this is indeed the end of Garnett’s Hall-of-Fame career, his final averages will be 17.8 points, 10.0 rebounds, 3.7 assists, 1.4 blocks and 1.3 steals through 1462 regular season contests. His shooting line will stand at .497/.275/.789.