Time has a funny way of working against the NBA big man. Kevin Garnett is learning that lesson the hard way. Garnett is on the clock, and the persistent ticking that serves as the backdrop for his NBA career is fading to a whisper. Eleven games remain this regular season for Garnett to rest an ankle that is causing to him to play some of the worst basketball of his career. Garnett's ever-ticking clock is quickly leading to his 37th birthday in May. The pain in his ankle also serves as a reminder that, despite any minutes restriction Doc Rivers might place on him, the C’s starting center is defying a nearly infallible timeline for NBA big men each time he takes the floor. Garnett has played in 1,320 regular-season NBA games and another 125 playoff games. He currently ranks 10th on the NBA’s all-time rebounding list with 13,820. Of the top 30 all-time rebounders in NBA history, only five -- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Moses Malone, Karl Malone, Robert Parrish and Kevin Willis -- played

Don't expect Paul Pierce to seek out Jason Terry this spring to reflect on NCAA tournament memories from their collegiate playing days. Pierce and Terry battled as college opponents in the 1997 Sweet 16, with Terry's Arizona Wildcats pulling off a stunning 85-82 upset of Pierce's Kansas Jayhawks, the top-seeded team in the entire tournament. Kansas was the odds-on favorite to win a national championship when it reached the Sweet 16 boasting a 34-1 record and one of the best starting fives -- Pierce, Raef LaFrentz, Jacque Vaughn, Scot Pollard and Jerod Haase -- in Kansas history. Since that time, Piece has cemented his legacy as a Hall-of-Famer, while LaFrentz, Vaughn and Pollard combined to play 34 seasons in the NBA, with both LaFrentz and Pollard having stints with the Celtics. Vaughn now is the coach of the Magic. On the other hand, fourth-seed Arizona was the underdog after finishing fifth in its own conference -- the Pac-10 -- during the regular season. The Wildcats, who entered the

Long before Kevin Garnett cemented himself as a future Hall-of-Famer, he was one of the riskiest draft prospects in NBA history. Now that Garnett is climbing the list of all-time greats to 15th on the all-time scoring list and 10th on the all-time rebounding list, it's easy to forget he once needed his agent to stage a pre-draft workout to drum up interest just so that he wouldn't fall out of the NBA lottery. In June of 1995, Garnett's original agent, Eric Fleisher, sensed that NBA executives were terrified of his 18-year-old client. Garnett was the type of player that got general managers fired. The lean, wiry big man refused to be listed as a 7-footer for fear that he'd be pigeonholed as a center. To make matter worse, Garnett was not considered to be a cerebral player. He had yet to achieve an SAT or ACT score that would allow him to play college basketball as a freshman. Furthermore, Garnett was considered a character risk due to an incident that occurred in his hometown of Mauldin,

Jeff Green couldn't bring himself to tell his mother he needed open-heart surgery after receiving the news from doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital on Dec. 9, 2011. The Celtics forward knew his mother, Felicia Akingube, would take the news the hardest in his immediate family of four. Green takes after his father, Jeff Green Sr., a man whom the Celtics forward describes as much like himself, "calm and relaxed." Green's mother is a different story -- a fiery, self-described "woman of strength" who attended every Georgetown home game during Jeff's three years there. Her larger-than-life personality won over the Georgetown student section so much that before each game from 2004 to 2007, the students welcomed her to the arena with the chant, "Jeff Green's mom," until Felicia Akingube acknowledged the fans with a wave. So when the 26-year-old Green, a Cheverly, Md., native, learned that he had an enlarged root aortic valve, a diagnosis that would require