Heart matters most to Garnett

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BOSTON -- If Kevin Garnett were to create his own statistical categories, you could expect to see some pretty unconventional measurements on there.

Forget about points, forget about rebounds. Garnett has his own system.

Prior to Saturday's game against the Philadelphia 76ers, head coach Doug Collins made note of the tens of thousands of minutes clocked by the Celtics veterans, a stark contrast to the young Sixers squad.Celtics head coach Doc Rivers passed along the message to his team, who responded with a 92-79 win following their one-point overtime loss the night before in Philadelphia.

After the game, Garnett (team high 19 points) offered up his own idea for monitoring NBA careers.

"One thing they don't keep track of is heart and cojones, ok?" he said. "You can monitor all the minutes you want, but you can't monitor someone's drive and what fuels them and motivations. Doc came in here and gave us that so, Doc's the best at getting the best out of us in certain ways and tonight was no different from that."

Collins noticed Garnett give the Celtics an extra spark during his 24 minutes.

"I love him, what hes all about," Collins said following the game. "He came in and his team was in a little bit of trouble, we got it to eight (points). I was hoping we could put a little game pressure on him to see what would happen. I knew they just lost a 17-0 lead, starting against Milwaukee the other night, getting them in a situation maybe get the game close, where maybe for three or four minutes maybe something could have happened. But Kevin put that to rest real quickly and we let (Chris) Wilcox get up under us twice for dunks, which was just lazy plays on our part.

Garnett was proud of his teammates for playing well in the categories that matter the most to him.

"It feels good," he said. "Philly's played us tough a couple times so this is not the last we're going to see of them. Doug gets those guys up and ready to play us, for some reason they play us well. Tonight I was just glad we were able to not only defend home court and be solid at home, but after last night's performance, everybody came here with a little chip on their shoulder so we need to play with a little edge more and more often."

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