To the extent Matt Barnes ever contributed to winning basketball games, it was in vaguely defined ways. He could kind of space the floor, shooting 33.5 percent from three over his fourteen-season career, and he was strong for his size, which meant you could stick him on bigger wings and smaller paint-dwellers and he would, if not shut them down, at least knock them around a little bit. He also frequently stared down guys like he was about to deck them, and sometimes made good on that threat. 

During the back half of his NBA tenure, he played on a lot of competitive squads: the 2010-11 Lakers, who were coming off two straight titles; three years with Blake Griffin and Chris Paul’s Clippers, as their customary Fifth Guy Who Probably Shouldn’t Be Starting; and a lone season with one of the last Grit’n’Grind Grizz teams. His final professional appearance was a one-minute cameo in Game 5 of Golden State’s most recent Finals triumph. The Warriors had picked him up late that year after the Kings waived him. He barely chipped in, but Matt Barnes is technically an NBA champion. 

If Barnes’s career deserves an obituary—he announced his retirement on Monday afternoon; he wasn’t on an NBA roster—it’s not for any of the reasons we typically hand these things out. He wasn’t a great player, nor was he some enormously promising Greg Oden-like talent whose wings got clipped prematurely. He didn’t display an outsize social conscience away from the court. His game wasn’t unconventional or forward-thinking. And yet Matt Barnes stands out among role players of his era. He was drafted, for instance, the same year as John Salmons, who was objectively a better player than Barnes but lives fuzzier in the memory because, there is no polite way to put this: John Salmons never discovered his estranged wife was hanging out with Derek Fisher and drove ninety-five miles to throw hands with the ex-Lakers guard.

Salmons similarly never made like he was going to whip a ball at Kobe Bryant’s head. He didn’t get a garbage time shot blocked by John Henson, and then, after both players were ejected, go looking for Henson in the tunnel. He didn’t foster an inscrutable years-long beef with Serge Ibaka. He didn’t once insinuate himself into a brawl that started with him putting his hands on Jason Terry and ended with him dumping then-Mavs assistant Terry Stotts into the courtside seats. You get the idea: Matt Barnes is famous for fighting people.

Had he played in the thick of the grimier early/mid-90s NBA, he might have been understood as just another one of those don’t-mess-around dudes: Anthony Mason, Charles Oakley, Rick Mahorn. But bridging as he did a more physical, self-consciously manly era of the league and one that is free-flowing in aesthetic and almost antiseptically friendly in temperament, Barnes acquired an increasingly ronin-like vibe as he aged. Year over year, he became more out of step with the modern NBA, not in the way back-to-the-basket big men recently have, but in terms of his entire conception of the sport. Barnes thinks of basketball as war in allegory and every so often in fact. Chris Palmer wrote a sympathetic profile of him last year, and in it, Barnes explains how his experiences have informed his character: I’ve seen people get shot, stabbed. I’ve seen the drugs. I’ve seen the abuse. I’m real. The way I look, people call me a pretty boy, tough guy, or a fake tough guy. But if you really have something to say then say it to my face and see where it goes. This quote is right in the middle of an extensive record of Barnes bullying other players. 

In short, Barnes has had a rough life and he takes immense pride in his proven ability to persevere—admirably and not, productively and otherwise. If it’s easy to see why Barnes senses (and occasionally invents) the potential for violent conflict in every interaction, it’s not always easy to excuse. The in-game scrapes are one thing, but the Fisher dust-up spoke to a deeper ugliness: a red streak that carried over to his off-court life. Barnes’s comments in the press afterwards—basically how can you move in on my girl like that?—revealed a misogynistically possessive attitude toward women. (And this is putting to one side Barnes’s domestic violence arrest in 2010, which both Barnes and his now ex-wife Gloria Govan say was handled improperly by overzealous police.) Surely Barnes could have talked out his dispute with Fisher, but Barnes would have thought of that as a betrayal of some essential principle, which is perhaps just a dessicated chestnut about old world masculinity, but it’s gotten him where he is in life. Matt Barnes doesn’t back down, no matter the personal cost or collateral damage. 

Earlier this year, Jason Concepcion wrote about the demise of the NBA enforcer, making a broad historical argument that the league’s ever-increasing popularity has coincided with games getting more balletic and less scrum-like—while acknowledging there’s a thrilling anti-beauty to a well-placed elbow. Too much pretty basketball, Concepcion writes, like too much anything, can overload the senses and leave the brain’s dopamine receptors chittering for other kinds of stimuli. Barnes was one of the last purveyors of this other stimuli: hard fouls, extracurriculars, brutality both pointed and pointless. At his best, he supplied edge, and at his worst, he riled and assaulted people for no reason. He was an interesting player for reasons that had little to do with accomplishment or skill. He was really, really tough—alluringly so—but, upon deeper consideration, also a terrific jerk. 

Now that he’s officially done with basketball, there are only a small handful of players like him left in the NBA. (Concepcion cites Udonis Haslem and James Johnson.) In his retirement-announcing Instagram post, Barnes referred to himself as the one that wasn’t supposed to be s--- & ended up making it… love me or hate me, I did it my way!! More than that, he did it a way that it isn’t done anymore. He represents a time that is either fully complete or very close to its conclusion. With both people and eras, as they slip away from us, we tend to regard them fondly and dwell on what’s being lost as if it’s a shame that we’re losing it, even if it’s miserable or harmful or dull. Because what we experience, good and bad, is who are, and we don’t want to feel like we’re forfeiting any part of ourselves. Matt Barnes’s career is a thorny thing to make sense of, but the end of it is certainly the end of something significant: a lurid and howling body of work and a league that has any place for a style so defiantly, heedlessly, nakedly confrontational.