Watching KG 3 Weeks before His Knee went Kerfluee

I've kept a handful of games on tape from last season to watch in preparation for this season. One of those games is from January 25th. We played Dallas at home. A few notes of interest.

We played the starters the entire first quarter. The first three reserves off the bench were Glen Davis, Brian Scalabrine, and Gabe Pruitt. Leon Powe played all of 9 minutes in a blowout and went 0-3 (Memo to file: When Shelden disappoints, remember Leon didn't always excel either). Despite leading by 27 points at half, and tallying 124 points for the game, the Boston Celtics had only one reserve who scored more than 10 points--Eddie House. That's a pretty telling fact about our bench, or lack thereof, last season.

But the most interesting part of the game, of course, was watching Kevin Garnett.

His right knee was heavily wrapped. KG went with black-colored wrap instead of the white wrap from earlier in the season. This was a strategic decision, I'm sure, since it was the white wrap that began the maelstrom of inquiry about the health of his knee. Perhaps it was even a joint decision by Garnett and the Belichickian brass to go with the black wrap.

Regardless, the Ticket played very well on offense. But he only grabbed two rebounds, and didn't block a shot in 25 minutes of play. The C's were on a roll, though, and they didn't need much more out of him. A few weeks later, the Ticket blocked 3 shots against the Lakers, at a time when they needed some intimidating defense from him. So I don't think we can say the knee was impacting his play to a noticeable degree in the weeks preceding the 2/19/09 game against Utah (where he left the game with a knee injury).

But the point here is that, even if we assume that Garnett's knee was impacting his play, he was still playing at a high level. He was catching ally-oops for dunks, throwing behind the back passes, going 11-17 from the field, and other was being a force on the floor. So if the only thing done to the knee during the operation was to remove bone spurs, then there is no reason that the KG I watched last night against the Mavs shouldn't return to that level of play pretty early in the 2009-10 season.

If he doesn't return to form by the end of November, or if he is slow to return to action, then something other than bone spurs aggravating a healthy tendon was the problem. What you have then is probably the strained popliteus tendon they talked about originally, a very rare injury, and not the injury Danny Ainge was later describing when he said "I don't think (his knee) was real serious. I think it was painful, but I don't think it was real serious."