Kevin Garnett’s return without restrictions

The feeling is strange but incredibly satisfying for coach Doc Rivers.

He ran the Celtics [team stats] hard through a practice yesterday, and Kevin Garnett was on the floor for every second of it - all of this after playing 30 minutes in his return the previous night after missing 10 games due to a hyperextended right knee.

“It’s good to have Kevin back - more important it’s good to see him playing better after the game and playing a lot of minutes,” Rivers said. “That’s a good sign for us.”

Another sign of these new times? Garnett is not being subjected to minutes monitoring.

“We felt pretty good about it before,” Rivers said of Garnett’s appearance in Friday night’s overtime win against Portland. “There wasn’t a minutes restriction - this is totally different from last season’s injury, and that’s why we were really not concerned about the minutes. Our only concern with him minute-wise is conditioning. It had nothing to do with the knee.

“We always put an extra guy on (the first) team (in practice) to give him rest and to give (Kendrick Perkins [stats]) rest as well, but he’s free to play.”

And the Celtics, a team with fractured chemistry during the last month, can start to re-form.

“We’re playing with a lot more energy and a lot of that has to do with our emotional leader coming back,” Paul Pierce [stats] said. “Now our goal is to finish strong going into the All-Star break over these next eight or nine games.

“I think it affects you chemistry-wise, because you get used to playing with the same units and everybody knowing their roles,” Pierce said. “But roles change as injuries hit . . . It’s an adjustment you have to make throughout the season, because injuries are part of a long season. But if we can get everybody back in the starting five, then everything is going to be fine.”

Putty in his hands

Marquis Daniels ran through some defensive drills during yesterday’s open practice in front of a group from New England Baptist Hospital, but once the balls were handed out, the swingman left the floor. His surgically repaired left thumb is still too tender for that kind of test.

“Wrap Silly Putty,” Rivers said of what Daniels can do with his left hand for the moment. “That’s about it. That’s all you can do. You don’t want him anywhere near a ball because he can get a bad pass off his hand. If you play, someone is definitely going to hit his hand. We just try to take it slow. He’s going through physical therapy. The muscle atrophied in his hand, and he’s trying to build it back up.”

Joint venture

Brian Scalabrine hopes to miss only one more game - tomorrow night’s home clash with the Clippers - because of a separated right shoulder, also known as a sprain of the acromioclavicular joint, or AC.

“It’s iced up - feels good,” said Scalabrine, who played with the injury a tad too long. “It got worse in Detroit (last Wednesday), but the big fella (Garnett) was out, so you’ve got to get out and play. It’s the nature of this beast.”

Added Rivers: “The AC sprains - they go out and they go back in. I have one. To this day I’ll be golfing and it will come out, and you just can’t do anything for a couple of days. But if it stays out it can get worse, but usually they go right back in and that’s what we have to deal with. They’re painful - I can tell you that. So Scal played with it out for a couple of games, and that’s just very painful, and it usually hurts your play.”