"If a guy was doing the Riverdance like that, coach would come over and say, 'Who's got the fewest amount of fouls of my big fellas?' " said ex-Celtic and TNT analyst Kevin McHale. "If you raised your hand, he would say, 'We will let him drive and then we will throw him on the ground.'

"When he is laying there we would say, 'Do you feel like dancing now?'

"And that pretty much solved the dancing problem."

"I'm a guy who never settles for a face-up jump shot. I'm going to get as deep in the post as possible," he said. "Some guys, even big guys, tend to settle. They spend the whole off season working on their outside game, trying to prove they can make that shot. I'm not one of those guys. Get to the rim: That should make sense to anybody."

But Boston coach Doc Rivers cherishes Perkins' defense as much for his brains as his brawn. "[Assistant head coach] Tom [Thibodeau] does a terrific job getting our guys to communicate, but at the end of the day, Kevin and Perk are seeing things before they happen; they have such high basketball IQs and adjust to all the wrinkles," Rivers said. "The other thing that has happened to Perk to make him better is his focus. He accepts who he is and knows that his biggest value to the team is being our best defender."

“He never used to bring his book to class or take any notes,” said Doug Bibby, Rondo’s freshman geometry teacher and, coincidentally, also his basketball coach for the three years he spent at Eastern High School in Louisville, Ky. “There were quite a few times when I gave out a problem for the class to work on, and he would just blurt out the answer. I would kind of get (ticked) because I thought he was just being an (expletive).”

here are few people now who Bibby holds in such esteem, but he still sounds upset. Rondo, who admittedly has such a mind for numbers that he can do equations off the top of his head, enjoyed studying his older brother William’s math assignments. Rondo was secretly engrossed in subjects like trigonometry and finite math while his classmates were poring over simple algebra and geometry.

“He always wanted to know what X was -- he always tried to figure out what was ahead,” said William Rondo, who is five years older than his 23-year-old brother.

But Rondo’s ambitious course load didn’t prevent Bibby from almost combusting each morning.

“He’d blurt out the answer when I gave a problem to the class, but I wouldn’t do anything -- I’d give the kids another 10 or 15 minutes to work it out and come up with an answer,” he said. “Come to find out, the little jerk was right.