The Celitics defense is better without Kevin Garnett

[BleedGreen1989]

. Secondly, Boston has figured out how to defend when a different star -- center Kevin Garnett -- is on the bench. During the first two months of the season, the Celtics' D sprung leaks every time Garnett rested. Since then, as NBA.com's John Schuhmann noted on Twitter earlier this week, they've actually defended slightly better when Garnett is off the floor.

Sorry guys I had to...all these Rondo stories are causing me to release anger through sheer sarcasm 

[BballTim]

  By simple math this had to be at least close to happening. His defensive +/- is close to half what it was earlier this year, the bench would need to be playing at his level or better for quite a while to shrink the number by that amount. People should be pretty familiar with this though, the bigs aside from KG improving their defense is a big part of the "Rondo effect".

  There will probably be 3 possible responses to this on the board. Either try and blame Rondo, consider possible trade options for KG since his play on defense is holding the team back, or claim that it's crazy to draw such conclusions from those numbers (except for when Rondo's involved).

  On second thought, the middle option above will never happen.

[pearljammer10]

Love it

[Meadowlark_Scal]

Oye..had to look..glad you were only kidding....!

[CelticConcourse]

No. This is true (when you look at +/-) during the win-streak.

However, think about it. Our only two "bad defenders" (who are 50th percentile, anyways) are Wilcox and Terry. Wilcox gets sparing minutes and Terry's still made clutch defensive plays (except Marco Belinelli ). The rest of our team:

Bradley (amazing)
Garnett (amazing)
Lee (well above average)
Bass (surprisingly above average)
Pierce (also up there)
Green (up there as well)
Terry (average)
Wilcox (average)

They're all spectacular man-to-man defenders. Adding zone into the mix has only helped. To be honest, we've been good whether or not KG is on the court. But, it's also dependent on who's usually on the court with KG (Terry is usually on with him I'm guessing) Very surprising, but great since now we don't have those maddening lulls on O and D.