Role-playing sage on rebuilding team? 'Toine's trying

Just two years removed from being a key contributor on Miami's title-winning team, Antoine Walker is playing limited minutes for the rebuilding Wolves. Ronald Martinez/Getty Images

MINNEAPOLIS -- Antoine Walker's old team, the Celtics, is all the rage in the NBA, described most frequently as "relevant again," something it wasn't for much of Walker's 7½ seasons in Boston.

Walker's old sidekick, Paul Pierce, is said to finally have, in Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen, the help he needs to chase an NBA championship. Walker teamed with Pierce for five-plus seasons but, obviously, wasn't good enough to get that done.

Walker's recent team, the Heat, decided that the 6-foot-9 forward, an integral part of its 2006 championship run, no longer was so integral and sent him packing late in the preseason for two Minnesota malcontents who haven't achieved a fraction of Walker's success in the game (NCAA title, NBA title, three All-Star selections). And the Heat had to sweeten the deal with cash and a future first-round draft pick.

Walker's recent coach, Pat Riley, set the stage for the trade by determining that Walker was overweight, a label that only heaps scorn and ridicule on a professional athlete with an average annual salary approaching $10 million.

Walker's new team, the Timberwolves, is projected to be one of the league's bottom-feeders, a rebuilding season in which squeezing nickels is as important to the front office as setting picks is to the coaching staff.

Walker's new coach, Randy Wittman, used him 39 minutes, total, in the first three games and, at New York on Nov. 4, let Walker sit for 32 minutes before sending him in with 11 seconds left, the Wolves down by three, to chuck up a game-tying shot. It missed from all the frost on it.

Each of the above slights, by itself, would be enough to sting an 11-year veteran whose pride and confidence always have been evident from the second deck in various NBA arenas. Together, packed into a few weeks' time, they are enough to almost make you feel sorry for Walker.

That's no small feat, considering how aggravating, occasionally veering into unwatchable, Walker's game has been for much of his career: a maddening amalgam of too many three-point shots, often chucked too quickly, with too few forays into the paint and not nearly enough committed thrusts on defense. There always has been a strong sense that no one, from his Boston days through stints with Dallas, Atlanta, Boston again and Miami, was more impressed with Walker's play than Walker himself. And we're not even going to mention -- aw, what the heck -- that goofball shimmy move, usually after made threes, that could creep out the dead.

Surely, though, Walker didn't deserve this, any more than he deserved to be duct-taped and robbed at gunpoint in his Chicago home this summer. Being banished to a lousy Wolves team in what again has become NBA flyover land? No one this side of Christian Laettner, maybe, deserved this.

"I want to have a good, positive outlook,'' Walker said the other night after Minnesota dropped to 0-3 with a home loss to Orlando. "I know what they want to accomplish here. They have some good young players who can be very good in this league. And I think we can win right now in the process of rebuilding, because you can see [the potential] from those first three [close] games. We don't know what it's going to take to make the playoffs. So we've got to start winning some games.''

Whoa, whoa, whoa. "Positive outlook?'' "We?'' This is coming from Walker, a guy acquired from the Heat not for what he is but, rather, for whom he isn't? The Wolves were resolute about shedding Ricky Davis and Mark Blount, two former Celtics capable of souring a locker room filled with even younger former Celtics. So they took back Walker from Miami because he was, in their minds, the least of three possible evils. One grumbling vet is better than two, Minnesota's brain trust figured.

Except that, so far, Walker has been a good soldier. Real or feigned, for now it's working.

"A lot of times I want to be on the court,'' he said. "But they're trying to develop guys. It's taking me a little time to find my way, to be effective. Hopefully, things can turn. It's a long season and I've been around this league for a long time, so I'm not going to get [ticked off] after three games.''

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