If a young team's talent was an ore deposit...
Then the coach was the furnace that refined that ore into steel.
And the most precious piece of ore in Lin Qi's hands was nineteen-year-old Kevin Garnett.
This kid was too special.
Developing him as an ordinary big man would destroy his instinctive flair; giving him free rein on the perimeter would waste his height and defensive gifts. What Lin Qi needed to do wasn't find him a coach, but build an entire development system around him...
Someone to teach him high-post facilitation, someone to teach him defensive discipline, someone to teach him low-post footwork, someone to teach him shooting, and someone to battle him fiercely in practice every day, trading trash talk and forcing him to learn how to survive in a 1990s paint.
A genius couldn't simply be coddled.
A genius needed shackles, too.
Lin Qi knew that a player like Garnett couldn't be developed just by force-feeding him minutes. He needed an environment that was ruthless enough, meticulous enough, and far enough ahead of its time. Only then would this lanky nineteen-year-old grow into more than just a good player...
He would become Boston's answer for the next decade.
But the first step in building that system was something Lin Qi didn't want to do, yet had to.
Show Chris Ford the door.
It wasn't a pleasant task. Ford hadn't done anything wrong. Last season, he had taken that "junk shop" of a roster to the Eastern Conference semifinals and pushed the championship-contending Knicks to Game 7. Whether measured by achievements or sheer hard work, he had done right by this team.
But Lin Qi knew that Ford was a good coach from a previous era.
He understood physical battles, half-court basketball, and how to grind opponents down with a group of veterans. But the steel Lin Qi wanted to forge was ten years ahead of its time... a team that would crush the league through spacing, switching, and freeing Garnett to become a "mobile offensive commander." Ford couldn't run that system, nor did he believe in it.
Their philosophies didn't align. Forcing things would only hurt them both.
Lin Qi spoke with great sincerity. Rather than act as though he were discarding Ford once he had served his purpose, he personally thanked him for his contributions last season, then called in connections and favors to help Ford secure a respectable landing spot with another team.
"Chris," Lin Qi said, "you were the one who led them to those results last season. I'll remember that for the rest of my life. But the path I'm taking next is so unorthodox that it scares even me. I can't gamble with your future alongside mine."
Ford was silent for a long time before finally extending his hand and shaking Lin Qi's.
"I don't understand that stuff of yours." The veteran coach smiled wryly. "But I didn't understand those trades you made last year either, and you won. I hope you're right this time, too."
They parted on good terms.
With Ford gone, Lin Qi needed two completely different men, neither of whom he could do without.
One would polish him, helping him shine with all his brilliance.
The other would hammer him into the hardest steel.
First came the former... the head coach. Lin Qi wanted a tactical master who could fully unleash Garnett's offensive gifts.
His target was Rick Adelman.
In the summer of 1995, Adelman's career was at a low point. He had been fired by the Trail Blazers the year before and had just taken over the utter mess that was the Golden State Warriors... Webber was demanding to leave, and the locker room was full of troublemakers. To outsiders, he was a washed-up coach whose talents had gone unrecognized, stuck holding a hot potato.
But Lin Qi knew that he was the godfather of developing passing, playmaking big men in NBA history.
Lin Qi flew out to see him. Instead of discussing salary first, he slid something across to him... footage of Garnett's games.
"Rick, look at this kid," Lin Qi said. "When he's wrestling with people in the low post, nothing looks comfortable. But once he gets to the high post at the free-throw line, catching the ball, facilitating, facing up, he comes alive. Everyone in the league sees his height, and their first instinct is to stick him under the basket as a blue-collar rebounder."
Adelman stared at the footage, his eyes growing brighter.
"But your eyes tell you that's a waste, don't they?" Lin Qi said. "That high-post facilitation system of yours... guards cutting like mad, a big man serving as the offensive hub at the free-throw line... you've spent your whole life searching for someone to embody it."
He pointed at the lanky teenager on the screen.
"Rick, he's the one. An offensive hub who's 2.11 meters tall, yet has a guard's brain and passing vision. Come to Boston. I'll give you complete tactical autonomy, plus a set of data intelligence resources nobody else in the league has. I've already brought you the man you've spent your whole life searching for to run this system. All you need to do is come and sculpt him."
Adelman was fired up almost on the spot. An unappreciated tactical genius had encountered an all-time talent tailor-made for him, along with complete autonomy... it was a temptation no coach could resist.
He walked away from the mess at the Warriors.
The good cop was in place. Adelman would stand at the tactics board and, little by little, sculpt nineteen-year-old Garnett into an offensive commander.
But a good cop alone wasn't enough. A team that could only play dazzling offense was soft. No matter how brightly a piece of ore gleamed, it could never become steel without repeated hammering and tempering.
The second man Lin Qi wanted was a devil.
Among the Philadelphia 76ers' unremarkable collection of assistant coaches, he found a name nobody had paid any attention to... Tom Thibodeau.
In 1995, Thibodeau was as ordinary an assistant coach as they came. Nobody knew that, in a few years, this man who slept only four hours a night and could roar at game tapes until dawn would become a founding figure of modern basketball defense, stunning the entire league with a system of "strong-side overload."
Poaching him cost Lin Qi next to nothing... a contract naming him "lead assistant and defensive head coach" was enough.
"Tom." Lin Qi slapped something Oliver and Sagarin had produced down in front of Thibodeau... an unheard-of "per-100-possession defensive heat map." "I've got a nineteen-year-old kid whose lateral quickness is the best I've ever seen in a big man. I want to train him into the most terrifying defensive monster in this league."
Looking at that heat map, something he had never seen before yet so precise it made his scalp tingle, Thibodeau's breathing changed.
This was exactly what he had dreamed of, yet no team had ever been willing to give him... a tool that could quantify defense to the utmost degree, along with a test subject with outrageous mobility whom he could mold however he pleased.
"You're saying..." Thibodeau's voice trembled slightly. "You want me to build a monster who can switch onto positions one through five?"
"Not just him," Lin Qi said. "There's Eddie Jones, Bowen, and P.J. Brown, too. I want you to train them into a defensive system no team in the league can beat, even if they have to shed a layer of skin trying."
Thibodeau signed. Pairing this training fiend with an obsessive like Garnett, who "felt uncomfortable all over if he went a day without practicing," made for two madmen who were a match made in heaven.
The good cop would praise and coax him. The bad cop would curse at him and push him. Adelman would make Garnett's offense dazzling and ahead of its time; Thibodeau would turn his defense into a nightmare. Add in that iron-willed tough guy Willie Anderson in the locker room, banging his 104-kilogram frame against him every day to teach him positioning, and Sam Cassell's ferocious mouth, stoking his competitive fire on the court every day...
The furnace for forging the ore was being built, brick by brick.
Late that night, Lin Qi stood at his office window.
The two central pillars... the good cop and the bad cop... were both in place. Adelman would unleash his offense, and Thibodeau would temper his defense. Yet something inside Lin Qi remained unfilled.
He was considering a question that frightened even him.
In the timeline he remembered, Garnett had been drafted by the Minnesota Timberwolves. There, the Celtics' own legendary power forward Kevin McHale had personally selected him and built an entire developmental environment around him... it was that whole environment that had battered and toughened a skinny, defiant high schooler, little by little, into the future "The Big Ticket."
But now, all of that was gone.
Lin Qi had intercepted Garnett and brought him to Boston. McHale's environment and the Timberwolves' staff no longer existed for him. Lin Qi would personally have to give him an entirely new furnace.
That left Lin Qi uncertain.
He had pulled this kid out of the fate originally destined for him. Without that developmental path already validated by history, would this nineteen-year-old still grow into the great Garnett?
Could the beating of his butterfly wings instead destroy a legend who should have gone down in history?
Or... could he use a better furnace to forge steel even harder than the original?
Nobody could answer that question for him. Not even he, a transmigrator holding the "correct answer," could answer it... because he himself had already crossed that answer out of history's script.
Whoever tied the knot had to untie it.
After thinking for a long time, Lin Qi finally made up his mind. He made a decision his scouting director found hard to believe.
He was going to ask someone for help.
Kevin McHale.