Take a bow, Mr. Miller

You might not take a guy as country strong as Timberwolves center Brad Miller for a wine connoisseur, but there he was last week after his sentimental return to Sacramento with a couple of bottles of red stashed discretely at his locker.

While his teammates showered and changed clothes around him, Miller opened a bottle, poured some wine into a paper cup and handed it to teammate Anthony Tolliver.

And then without a word said, he drank a toast to a 14-year NBA career that nobody, not even him, could have imagined when he left Purdue undrafted in 1998.

"You can't complain about it," he said about his career in his typical dry, understated way. "I've been here a lot more than they wanted me to be in here. I outlasted quite a few high draft picks, that's for sure."

The guy who no NBA team wanted coming out of college was named to consecutive All-Star Games.

He entered the league during a lockout season and is leaving it, planning to officially file his retirement paperwork in late June, in yet another lockout season. In between, he played nearly six seasons in Sacramento and for Wolves coach Rick Adelman in three different cities.

He was asked last week how he overachieved so, playing with Chris Webber and Vlade Divac on Kings teams that contended in the West and making more money than he ever imagined.

He is saying farewell these final weeks without any sort of goodbye tour -- no rocking chairs presented him in a pregame ceremony -- other than perhaps last week's return to the place they once called ARCO Arena.

Adelman started him in that game for the first time this season, saying it wasn't a sentimental choice but rather a strategic move intended to keep Kevin Love from defending Kings big man DeMarcus Cousins. Miller responded by scoring 11 points in a mere eight minutes -- nine of them on three successful three-point shots without a miss -- and Adelman later said if he had known Miller would have hit threes like that, he would have started him much sooner this season.

"Smart player," Adelman said. "You put him on the floor and your team becomes better."

And now it's almost time to go. He owns land back home in Indiana but plans to return to Sacramento after he retires, bringing his wife and daughter back to a place they moved all their stuff from only to move it back a year later because they realized it feels like home.

It's time to go because, at age 35, his knees are telling him to do so after surgeries in consecutive years.