Kevin Garnett Says AAU Ball Has "Killed" the NBA, Makes Today's Players More Entitled

Kevin Garnett thinks AAU ball has "killed" the NBA and makes today's players more entitled.

Kevin Garnett before a 2016 game.
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Image via USA Today Sports/Derick E. Hingle

Kevin Garnett before a 2016 game.

When it comes to the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), consider Kevin Garnett no fan. The former MVP and future Hall of Famer made his thoughts on the popular organization well known while sitting down for a Monday interview on NBATV with ex-coach Kevin McHale.

Garnett, who played AAU ball before jumping straight into the pros from high school, told McHale that AAU competition doesn't properly prepare future players, and that it also creates a sense of entitlement.

"Our league now is at a point where you have to teach more than anything. AAU has killed our league," he said. "Seriously, I hate to even say this, but it's real. From the perspective that these kids are not being taught anything. They have intentions and they want things, but the way they see it is not how our league works. You earn everything in this league. You're not entitled to anything."

Garnett's remarks seemed to be a combination of relatively recent comments by other hoops legends, Kobe Bryant and Charles Barkley.

Back in 2015 Bryant, who also participated in AAU competition as a teen, had a similar observation about how much it preps you for the NBA. "It's stupid," Bryant said at the time. "It doesn't teach our kids how to play the game at all so you wind up having players that are big and they bring it up and they do all this fancy crap and they don't know how to post. They don't know the fundamentals of the game. It's stupid."

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As for Barkley, he (not surprisingly) was the one who seemed to imply that this era's attitude is a product of AAU ball as, just two weeks ago on Mike & Mike, he called today's generation "AAU babies." Barkley's statement came as a response to Draymond Green and Dwyane Wade, who themselves were defending LeBron James after that time LeBron got mad because Barkley called him "whiny."

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