Trying to Determine Kevin Garnett's Status

(Keith Allison)


By: Greg Payne

For reasons I do not fully understand, a decent number of people have come up to me in recent weeks with legitimate concern that Kevin Garnett will not be healthy to start the season. I ask them what their basis is for these concerns. Have they read some report that I have not? Has some news story broke and those with a handy dandy IPhone got to it before I did (did Apple come out with a Kevin Garnett injury app just for us Celtics fans?)? Nope. According to these people, they're just concerned at the lack of news we're hearing about him.

Fair enough, I suppose. So, in an effort to stymie any concerns, allow me to take you on a tour of the various news reports that should give us hope that KG is indeed back to normal:

June 26, 2009. WEEI:

(Danny Ainge):

Kevin, it was amazing. His entire countenance over the last six weeks of the season, he was just kind of down and grumpy and uncomfortable. I think he felt pressure to try to come back and he had all this pain in his knee.

Right after the surgery – I mean three days after the surgery – a smile on his face, he can bend his knee all the way. He can straighten it out all the way. He just went back to the West Coast the other day. Before he left, I saw him doing full weight workouts. He was doing squats – one-legged squats, two-legged squats – he was doing most of his whole routine again. His spirit is returned: his enthusiasm for the upcoming season, his hope.

All of a sudden, he’s back to being the real Kevin Garnett. His personality has returned. You could just see that once he had that bone spur on the back of his knee, that that was really bothering him.

July 9, 2009. Boston Globe:

Rivers on Kevin Garnett, who is recovering from right knee surgery: “He looks great. Good to see him walk normal again and talk more, definitely louder and happier. So, Kevin is back.’’

July 10, 2009. Boston Herald:

"I'm feeling great," Garnett said as he sat at the dais on the team's practice court at HealthPoint in Waltham. "If (team trainer) Ed Lacerte wasn't here or if we didn't have so many people around, I'd take off running right now."

"My rehab is going really well," Garnett said. "I'm ahead of schedule. At this point, I'm just trying to continue to heal and continue to get stronger."lt

If anyone else has found more, please feel free to shoot them my way. Now (and here comes the dreaded over-analysis) can we take solace in these comments or are we going to take the, 'Well, the Celtics obviously aren't going to tell us if anything is wrong' route? But personally, I feel like if KG was still not ready, someone would have figured it out by now.

The team and its officials are easily capable of with holding specific information (are you looking to sign a veteran backup point guard? What does management really think of Tony Allen? Was Rajon Rondo ever seriously close to being traded?), but KG's injury is so important to next season that it just seems unlikely that they would hide it all summer long and then blast us with a strict half-by-half minute restriction once the season gets under way.

So I'm going to take the various comments as legitimate and say that yes, Kevin Garnett should be back to full strength once training camp kicks off in less than a month (less than a month!). And if not, well then we can all be very very angry and try and throw the above quotes in the faces of whoever we feel has lied to us. Fair enough?