Media Day: KG, Tony Allen Injury Updates

Training camp for most of the teams in Association opens on Tuesday, which means that Monday was, in addition to Yom Kippur, Media Day around the league. And so while religious Jews spent the holiest of holy days at synagogue and fasting, those who worship the basketball gods first and foremost sat in front of their computers all day, eager for tidbits to break the basketball fast that is the NBA offseason.

The basketball blogosphere is atwitter -- and a-Twitter -- with coverage from Media Day around the league, but the truth is that Media Day is a little bit overrated, at least in terms of the quality of the information that comes out. To me, Media Day is exciting because it means the regular season is about a month away. But unless your point guard and presumed future of the franchise tells reporters that he can't play alongside the shooting guard you just took with the seventh pick in the draft, Media Day rarely produces more than sterile sound bytes about winning and being unselfish and being in better shape than last year.

Boston, however, was an exception, with a couple of items of interest regarding injuries. One is good, and one is bad. Sort of. (I'll explain in a moment).

First, the good. Kevin Garnett has apparently been participating in five-on-five scrimmages for the past week, and Doc Rivers said that there are no medical restrictions on Garnett as training camp opens. After a summer full of speculation regarding the extent of the knee injury that effectively ended the Celtics' title defense in February, this brings a sigh of relief to Celtics fans, albeit a conditional one; we similarly sighed last year when the team first announced that KG would only be out two or three weeks, and when he came back for four games in March, and when we were told he'd play in the last game of the season in preparation for the playoffs. And we all know how that turned out.

So Celtics fans who aren't inclined to believe a thing Doc and Danny say about KG's knee can be forgiven, although there's reason to think they're telling the truth this time. For starters, whatever incentive there was to keep everything close to the vest last year would seem to be gone at the beginning of this season, when the extent of the injury is known and the organization has had time to deal with it, basketball-wise. Secondly, and perhaps most telling, this would be a much farther-reaching level of deception, as Garnett and some of the players have confirmed his participation in the scrimmages. It would be more than just front office spin.

Now, the (kind of) bad. Tony Allen may miss training camp with an ankle injury that has bothered him for a while now. It's bad because Tony is a human being who feels pain, but basketball-wise, there's a rather substantial silver lining to this news.

First of all, even if Tony never plays again -- there's no indication that this is a risk; I'm just using the worst-case scenario for illustrative purposes -- it ideally wouldn't affect this year's team unless several other people got injured. Tony's minutes, all of them, should go to the newly-acquired Marquis Daniels.

Second, an extended absence would mean that Doc would have to give a serious look at Bill Walker. Ideally, the second-year man out of Kansas State would backup Paul Pierce at the small forward position; the only other three on the roster is Brian Scalabrine, who is more of a four defensively and is, frankly, a zero offensively. Walker's presence would create a second team of Daniels, Eddie House, Walker, Glen Davis, and Rasheed Wallace, allowing Pierce and Ray Allen more rest than they got last year (though both claim that minutes aren't really an issue). Walker spent most of his rookie season in the D-League and is headed there again unless he proves himself ready, and Tony's injury might give him that opportunity.