Last night was the first Celtic exhibition game that was going to be televised this season. Now, while pre-season games in any sport are pretty meaningless, exhibition basketball might be the worse of them all. No one plays much defense, the timing is off so there are a lot of bad passes and even the refs are out of it so there are a ton of fouls called (more on that in a second). After the first quarter you see even less coordination as end-of-the-bench guys finally get some run with the guys who were big names in college, but haven't been heard from since. Those guys are so determined to impress coaching staffs (theirs or any others that may be watching) that they frequently go 1 on 5 in an effort to pad the stats. It's like watching a pick-up game at the local Y, only these guys can actually dunk.
The main reason I tuned in, though, was because I was really anxious to see how Kevin Garnett played last night. Garnett is coming off some knee surgery, the extent of which was carefully guarded. There were reports it was just cleaning some bone spurs up, other reports were that his knee had to be rebuilt and is currently held together by gum, tape and dreams. No one is saying how bad it really was, or if he's even fully recovered yet. So, I went into last night's game expecting the worst and looked for any sign of a limp. He seemed to move ok and had nice rhythm on his shots. But, he also took a hard foul from a Rockets player that made me hold my breath. We're only going as far as Garnett's knee takes us this season, so having to worry every time he goes for an alley-oop is not going to be a fun way to spend the season. Every hard foul is a chance he re-injures himself and takes our title hopes with him. We went from having a dominant low-post player to a $21 million Faberge egg. Awesome. I'm going to have gray hair by January.
-When the NBA announced that it was locking out it's normal crew of NBA refs, every player and beat writer began to warn us how bad it was going to get. The new guys wouldn't have the guts to call fouls on star players, leading to players taking matters into their own hands and committing harder fouls, which would lead to fights and suspensions. Basically, the old refs were the keepers of the peace and no one would be able to replace their brand of justice. There's only one problem - no one goes to games to watch the refs. Honestly, until someone mentioned it in the third quarter I had forgotten all about it. Last night's game actually featured a high number of fouls, which tells me the new guys may go the other way on this. I still think the ref union will compromise and the full-time guys will be back in time for the regular season, but if they think anyone is going to complain if Joey Crawford isn't out there, they've got another thing coming.
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