"He's been here several weeks working out," Rivers said prior to teeing off at the team's Shamrock Foundation Golf Tournament at Nashawtuc Country Club. "He's fine. He's good. We're just going to let him run. He's never eased into anything in his life. I don't think he'll do it in this one."

“He’s happy, he’s talking more, which I didn’t think was possible,” Rivers said following the USI Shamrock Classic at the Nashawtuc Country Club in Concord. “He’s got his quickness back and he just looks normal again.”

Talking more?

Over the last 14 years, Garnett has developed a reputation as one of the most vocal players in the league. This offseason his words have a different message.

Garnett has been joining his teammates at the Sports Authority Training Center in Waltham as they prepare for training camp. Even though the Celtics forward, who is coming off season-ending knee surgery, has not been cleared for contact drills, he has found his own way to participate during workouts.

“His presence has been felt. He has been talking more, but you don’t know when he starts playing, maybe he’ll talk less,” Brian Scalabrine said with a laugh. “But he has been leading us in a very instructional kind of way. Before he was like that, but now, like he pulled me aside the other day. He was like, ‘You know, you have to play the game within the game. If you’re trying to get something done later, you want to set it up with something early.’

“And it helps. I went out there and I did it, and it worked right away. He’s a really intelligent guy.”

Allen said Kevin Garnett was in attendance for the workouts, and indicated he thought Garnett just about ready to come off the pick-up game DL after offseason knee surgery.

“Kevin looks strong,” Allen said. “He’s been working and shooting. People have been asking me that all summer. Only he can tell you how he feels and how his body is responding.”

Training camp may still be more than a week away, but Ray Allen is already finding ways to win with prized offseason free agent pickup Rasheed Wallace.

Allen said earlier today at the team’s Shamrock Foundation Golf Tournament that many players have been practicing informally at HealthPoint for the past couple of weeks and that Wallace has been a key to his success in ruling the pickup games.

On my team, I just had guys who were really moving the ball. Rasheed was one of those guys on my team and Rasheed was … one game he must have hit every shot.

“I would come off a pick-and-roll and throw it right back to him. You’ve got to help on me and Rasheed is wide open. So he just knocked them down. He’s backpeddling down the floor saying: ‘Somebody better get out on me! I’m hot.’

“It was great because, as competitive as we all are, you see that when we work and we play.”

“Marquis, that’s the guy no one talks about,’’ Rivers said. “I’m really looking forward to coaching him. I didn’t like coaching against him; I thought he was very difficult to match up to. He can play 2 or 3 and he has the ability to handle the ball. We’ll use him at point forward.

“Defensively is where I like him. I thought last year, without having Posey, we didn’t have that other guy that could guard guys off the bench, and that put a lot of stress on Ray and Paul. And this year, we’ll have another guy to defend.

“He’s going to replace [Posey] as far as minutes, but they are totally different. Both of them are very tough-minded, which is good. Posey was a guy who spread the floor more, Marquis will be a guy with the ball in his hands more and making decisions.

It was important to get everyone back. We thought at the end of the year we had to add to the team and I thought we did that. But we didn’t want to lose anyone, and we didn’t. We basically ended up with the team we had last year, with more, better players. I just like our team this year.