Slam’s Daniel Edward Rosen has what may be the best piece so far on Kevin Garnett’s off-season rehabilitation, and it’s the best piece precisely because it sidesteps the Celtics organization—justifiably secretive as they are—completely.
The story focuses on Joe Abunussar, a trainer at Impact Basketball in Vegas whom KG originally hooked up during his days with the T’Wolves. Impact draws a bunch of NBA players every off-season for training, scrimmages, etc. I’m going to limit the excerpting here, because you should read Rosen’s whole piece if you’re interested. In particular, Rosen, through Abunussar, reveals just how badly damaged KG’s entire body was as recently as August. That’s the meat of the piece, and you should click over to read it.
Here are two teasers:
Nearly every day Rudy Gay and Memphis Grizzlies teammate Kyle Lowry sluggishly entered the Impact gym at 11 a.m., they saw Garnett sitting in the weight room, catching his breath and staring around the gym. “You don’t even see him work out,” says Gay during a practice session at Impact earlier in September. “But then you talk to Joe and he says, ‘yeah, I’ve been here since 7 a.m., working out KG’… that gives you something to learn from.”
Detroit Pistons rookie Austin Daye, having trained at Impact since May, often found himself marveling at Garnett’s untiring dedication to his workout. “He’s a physical specimen, that man is,” says Daye.
Awesome. I love KG.
And this seemingly throwaway sentence which once again hints at the possibility something more happened in KG’s surgery, a possibility we’ve written enough about here:
It was August, and Garnett was three months removed from the arthroscopic surgery on the injured right knee that removed posterior bone spurs and perhaps more.
Perhaps more, huh? Ugh. Here we go again.
But seriously. Go read the piece.
Trackbacks/
Pingbacks