Rivers Tries to Save Garnett From Himself

What a fickle basketball world we live in today. The Celtics were cruising toward immortality, and then all of a sudden, a loss to arch-rival Lakers (heightens tension) and then those awful Warriors (humbling). Now, they’re just one of the three best teams in the NBA, neck-in-neck with the Lakers and Cavs when you look ahead to this spring.
↵
↵For Doc River, this process is all about maximizing Kevin Garnett. From The Boston Herald:↵↵⇥Rivers plans to lighten the load on Garnett, if possible. The idea is to get him fresher for the more critical points in the game.↵⇥
↵⇥
↵⇥“That’s something we’re going to do more, just to give him more rest,” the coach said. “I just think playing him less than eight minutes in a row is solid because it gives him a chance to come back in the game. We’re finding the longer you keep him on the floor, then he doesn’t have much coming back in. So if we can keep doing it, it would be great.”↵↵

You can look at this as so much shrewd tinkering, or trying to find that extra bit of dominance it’s going to take to fend off Los Angeles or Cleveland. But -- and I know, this won’t make Boston fans happy -- this is also a sign that this team is aging. We thought that Ray Allen’s struggles last season were a function of his slow decay; turns out we were wrong. This approach to Garnett, though, seems an admission that the Ticket needs to be deployed with an eye toward efficiency and effectiveness. Otherwise, he’ll buckle under the weight of his own intensity and this team’s ceiling really will close in the next year or two.↵
↵
↵Though you’ll excuse me if micro-managing the PT of Garnett -- a notorious livewire who plays each second like it’s Game Seven of the Finals and has recently come under criticism for his inability to manage his intensity -- seems a little dissonant, even sad. KG already matured as a player years ago, at least as much as he’s ever going to. Now it’s about saving himself from himself, while at the same time knowing that you need that full-bore presence in the playoffs to have any chance at repeating.↵