I know, Kendrick Perkins isn’t a Celtic anymore. But we’re in a lockout, people, meaning news is slower than Eddy Curry on tranquilizers. Plus, the Perkins story is becoming interesting as it gets more complicated daily.

Perkins now claims complete innocence in regards to his public intoxication and disorderly conduct charges. In fact, he claims he drank nothing but water that night. (The Oklahoman)

“Although these may be misdemeanors, it’s a big deal to Kendrick,” said Denise White, a publicist for Perkins, in an emailed statement to The Oklahoman. “He’s not happy about how things happened that evening and feels like the police were out of hand.” …

The biggest falsity, White said, is Perkins reportedly being drunk.

“He was not drinking alcohol, nor was he intoxicated,” said White, CEO and founder of EAG Sports Management. “Not one drop of alcohol Friday night. We’re not sure why they said Kendrick was intoxicated.”

According to White, police didn’t administer a breathalyzer or field sobriety test at the scene or the police station.

“There are witnesses inside the club that will attest to Kendrick only drinking water that evening,” White said.

White said the altercation early Saturday morning stemmed from Perkins attempting to collect money from the club manager with whom he had struck a deal for the use of the establishment as an after party site wrapping up the event. The money, White said, was to go to Perkins’ foundation, which aims to help children learn life skills and drug-awareness. According to White, the club owner became combative with Perkins and refused to hand over the money. An assistant to Perkins diffused the situation before “the lone policeman inside the club started harassing Kendrick to leave,” White said. Once outside, White said, another officer became more combative with Perkins, pushing him and grabbing his arm. Perkins, White said, was upset and pulled away. The officer then arrested him.

“We still don’t know why he was physical with Kendrick,” White said.

Oh, cops.

Details will continue to emerge, and I assume Perkins’s name will be cleared. If he’s lying now, it’s the worst public relations mistake he could make — reputations can easily survive one public intoxication and disorderly conduct charge, but lying about said charges would likely bring backlash.

I feel like Morgan, the little sister from Boy Meets World, right now. I’ve been in time out for three years and I’m finally making a return to the show — er, a return to writing.

In actuality, I haven’t been in time out. I haven’t been having recurring nightmares about a drunken, belligerent Kendrick Perkins either. My grandfather Pop Pop passed away from a cancerous tumor, and spending time with my family vaulted over everything else on my list of priorities — my golf swing is now in shambles, I haven’t updated my website in a week, my jump shot is rusty, and, no, I wouldn’t change any of that because experiencing the love my family emanated this week changed my life.

Pop Pop’s in a better place now, a place where he can finally play golf again, a place where his face does not have a tumor, a place where he can reunite with his parents, both of whom died before he was three years old, a place where he can walk without a walker, go to the bathroom without a diaper, sleep without pain, . I assume he’s playing 18 holes now, and when he’s done he’ll wait in the clubhouse for my grandmother Kicki and the rest of us to meet him for dinner.

In the meantime, I’m back to business as usual. That means discussing the major developments that happened during my intermission:

1. Kendrick Perkins arrested for public intoxication and disorderly conduct

Thinks of Perkins searching for a fight with regulation-sized human beings.

Shivers in fear.

Remembers how many times he’s seen drunken people trying to fight.

Gives Perk the benefit of the doubt . . . this time.

2. Kendrick Perkins claims he is innocent and suffered injuries from the fight

Perk suffered injuries in a bar fight? That can’t be great for his street cred.

3. Kendrick Perkins considering filing a police brutality complaint over incident

Whoa. Now this Perkins story is getting a bit crazy. One second I envision Perkins stomping around a bar looking like Godzilla scavenging for young civilians. The next, Perkins claims injury, denies the police version of the incident, and is considering a suit against the fuzz. Ladies and gentleman, your 2011 news cycle. Also, for whatever it’s worth, as much as Perkins scowls on the court, he’s just about the last person I would expect to get into a bar fight.

4. Kendrick Perkins is no longer a Boston Celtic

Yet I keep talking about him. Ugh. Note to self: it’s time to let Perk go.

5. Ray Allen says a cancelled season will not doom the Celtics

Yeah, a core of Rajon Rondo, 37-year old Ray Allen, 36-year old Kevin Garnett and 35-year old Paul Pierce would definitely return as contenders in 2012-’13. And Lindsey Lohan is a perfect role model for your children.

6. Rondo’s elbow feeling good

Rondo participated in a Kentucky exhibition game and reportedly looked good.

6. Doc Rivers might be searching for a defensive coordinator

The NBA lockout needs to end, mostly because this is what constitutes a rumor right now. I never would have guessed how much I miss free agency rumors that don’t involve foreign countries. I would even kill for a “Celtics work out Adam Morrison and Kwame Brown” headline right now.

(Editor’s note: Jessica Camerato’s piece on Marquis Daniels, from which these quotes were taken, is a good one. Check it out.)

Marquis Daniels feels better. Not the kind of better where he’s ready to play in an NBA game tomorrow (if there were NBA games tomorrow, that is), but the kind of better where — six months after being temporarily paralyzed — he can now shoot, lift weights and run, although he has not yet been cleared for contact. (CSNNE)

“I’m a guy I don’t get too high on the highs or too low on the lows,” he said. “If that was going to be it for me, I was willing to accept it. But I knew that I still had love for the game and I still could play, so I’m always going to work hard to try to get myself back to the things I love doing and get back on the court.”

It’s a message he sums up in less than 140 characters every time he tweets to his more than 30,000 followers. His signature #beleedat hashtag has taken on a special meaning since that afternoon in February.

“Basically whatever you believe in, it can happen,” he said. “With my situation, I know a lot of people probably think, ‘He’s done. He won’t be back.’

“But #beleedat I will be back.”

Daniels will consider the Celtics if and when he makes an NBA return, but the important thing is his health. He hopes to be cleared for contact drills this month, and the next step after that clearance will be how he handles taking a hit.

“I’ve got to see how I react to it first,“ he told CSNNE. “I know it’s going to hurt. . . . Once I get that first hit, that first bump, I’ll be ok.”

I don’t want to pour water on Daniels’ return. I don’t want to be the asshole who says, “Guys, returning from a sprained ankle is tough enough — returning from a serious spinal cord injury, after being temporarily paralyzed, when you still can’t participate in contact drills yet,” is almost impossible. But I’m going to be that asshole. Daniels faces steep odds to come back. I hope I’m wrong, but I can’t imagine suffering a severe spinal cord injury and then returning to full strength.

But I’ll be rooting for him. Beleedat.

I almost felt sympathetic toward Reggie Jackson. The NBA lockout has robbed his income. He drives a rental car. Lives in a modest apartment. Searches to spend “the lowest expense that he can,” because right now, a loan that consists of “a small amount that only keeps him afloat” is his only source of spending money.

And then I remembered that Jackson, the 24th pick of the Oklahoma City Thunder, will make millions of dollars to play basketball as soon as the lockout is lifted.

Millionaires are fighting billionaires because both sides feel mistreated. When I think about that with perspective, it makes me puke until I dry heave, then dry heave until my stomach convulses.

When my stomach finally starts to feel better, I want to side with the players because fiscally irresponsible owners are blaming players for their own mistakes. The owners will spend $55 million on Brendan Haywood and $35 million on Travis Outlaw, then ask the entire league for pay cuts. It just doesn’t make sense. Especially not when I see firsthand how much money NBA teams waste — spend time in a home team’s NBA locker room, and you’ll see a postgame dinner spread for champions, and perhaps two players will eat from it. The rest of the food, I would guess, is wasted, thrown away, evaporated to the land of sunk costs. How much more money do teams spend extraneously, on extra pairs of socks, or cheerleader squads, or gift kits for media members, or by printing out media booklets during the internet era, or on light shows before the game, or t-shirts that sit forgotten in an assistant coach’s bottom drawer until a Celtics Town blogger moves the assistant coach’s furniture and spots them (true story)?

Asking players for a ten-year pay freeze is ridiculous. So is proposing an $11 million maximum contract, when some projections have estimated that Lebron James is actually worth $54.4 million per season. So is blaming player salaries for the league’s financial troubles, when NBA revenues increased this year and the player salaries have been set at 57% of revenues since the recently expired Collective Bargaining Agreement began. So is saying that NBA teams lost a combined $340 million this season when those calculations don’t include revenues indirectly related to the team — for example, the Celtics negotiated a 20% ownership stake in Comcast Sports Network New England. When that deal begins in 2017, none of the resulting money will be accounted for in the Celtics’ financial statements.

Then again, the players don’t have much to complain about, either. Maximum salaries capped at $11 million? Might as well put NBA superstars on food stamps. Minimum salaries at $1.4 million? That’s not even enough to feed one of Latrell Sprewell’s children. A collective $2 billion pay minimum? The players will all be on welfare.

I want to root for the players because I see the injustice of what the owners are trying to accomplish. Then I read about Reggie Jackson, made out to be a sympathetic figure (he needed to take out a loan, people! he drives a normal car! he lives in a modest apartment!), who has millions of dollars waiting for him whenever a group of millionaires and billionaires decide to stop being greedy.

Some people have real problems.

The imaginary horns celebration came to define Darius Miles, or, at least, it became his most recognizable trait. The horns are the one aspect of Miles’ disappointing NBA career that will survive the longest in NBA lore, the first thing people will discuss whenever Miles’s name randomly pops up on an August weekday, whether the mention of his name comes after he gets arrested for carrying a loaded weapon into the airport or somehow, improbably, hypothetically, in the future, makes a return to professional basketball.

When Miles signed a non-guaranteed contract with the Boston Celtics on August 22, 2008, my 21st birthday, I offered the imaginary horns to my three brothers. I didn’t expect anything to come from the signing. Miles hadn’t been relevant since 2006; that was when he suffered a right knee injury so bad that the NBA deemed it career-ending and gave Portland salary cap relief for Miles’ contract. But this was Darius Miles who the Celtics signed — 6’9, third overall draft pick in 2000, arms longer than an airport runway, legs containing jet packs, once scored 47 points in an NBA game, had a cameo in “Van Wilder”, still only 26 years old — and so I gave the imaginary horns symbol to my brothers, the same symbol Miles and Quentin Richardson had presented to each other after every highlight play, or simply whenever they figured a situation merited pounding their heads.

That Miles never played a single regular season game for the Celtics came as no surprise. He had relied almost solely on his athleticism during his unsatisfying NBA stint, and his legs, deadened by the injury, resulting microfracture surgery, and two years of inactivity, no longer acted as trampolines. Adding to that, Miles was known as a problem child. Once, he shouted racial epithets at head coach Maurice Cheeks. Cheeks told Miles to leave the team’s film session, and Miles responded, “Make me.” When catching a fruit is no longer worth the juice, careers end and imaginary horns get put to sleep.

Miles did return for 34 games with the Memphis Grizzlies during the 08-09 season, but by then he was little more than a novelty act. Two years later, a couple days ago, he was arrested for carrying a loaded gun into the last place on earth anyone would carry a loaded gun, the airport. His basketball career is almost certainly over, another prodigious talent wasted to injury, drugs, crime, and/or a work ethic that couldn’t keep up with his outrageous physical talent.

So what makes a player become a bust? Why did Kwame Brown never become more than a serviceable NBA player, even though NBA scouts once salivated over him? Why did Micheal Olowakandi, drafted ahead of Paul Pierce, Dirk Nowitzki and Vince Carter, become the butt of jokes rather than an All-Star center? Why did Lenny Cooke go from being Lebron before Lebron to a second-round draft pick who never played a single NBA game?

Cooke haunts me. Not in the way that I lay awake thinking he’s hiding underneath my bed waiting to hurt me, but in the way that I think about him a lot more often than I should. I never saw Cooke play live. I never spoke a word to him and probably never will. I hold no ties to him whatsoever except that I read about him when I was younger, and his potential floored me. But whenever a young player fails to pan out, I think about Cooke. I wonder why he never became an NBA star. Did he turn to drugs? Gangs? Did he stop working out? Eat too much? Listen to bad advice? All of the above?

Search for Lenny Cooke highlights on YouTube. The only video you’ll find is a grainy one entitled, “Remember when we played with Lenny Cooke?” That’s all we have left of the Lebron before Lebron, one of the most-hyped high school athletes of all time, a player who was ranked No. 1 in the high school class of 2002 for years, who dropped to No. 4 during his senior year (behind players named Carmelo Anthony, Amare Stoudemire and, um, Raymond Felton), whose stock only dropped when he was ineligible to play high school ball as a senior, who flew with the eagles and was said to see the game three passes ahead, whose only professional basketball experience came with the Columbus Riverdragons, Brevard Blue Ducks, Brooklyn Kings, Purefoods TJ Hot Dogs, Shanghai Dongfang Sharks, and, most recently, the Minot Skyrockets. A player who possessed the talent to become a cultural icon has only one YouTube highlight reel. It’s as poorly-constructed as Cooke’s plans to maximize his potential, and it only serves as a reminder of Cooke’s steep and sudden downfall.

In the NBA, the differences between players can be minute. One of the largest differences between J.J. Redick and Adam Morrison is that Morrison smoked two packs (or so) per day. Redick worked hard, understood his basketball mortality, redefined his game, and carved a role for himself. Morrison could not, or would not, do the same. So his NBA career lasted many fewer years than Kevin Ollie’s, who had less than one-tenth of Morrison’s offensive repertoire but kept himself in world-class shape at all times.

Ollie couldn’t hold Lenny Cooke’s jock, yet he surpassed everything Cooke did in the NBA by 13 years, 2,496 points, 1,501 assists, 1,018 rebounds, and $20.1 million worth of salary. $20.1 million pales in comparison to the $51 million Kwame Brown has earned been paid during his career. A year before Brown became the No. 1 pick in the 2001 draft, he competed in the Adidas ABCD Camp. The MVP of that camp, which included Brown, Eddy Curry, Ben Gordon, Randy Foye, and Sebastian Telfair, among others, was a sophomore named Lenny Cooke.

I have now gone full circle with my six degrees of separation, NBA bust division, but what I’m trying to say is that talent alone is not enough. In the NBA, where every player is gifted beyond belief (err, almost every player — Scal comes to mind, among others), so many things can derail careers — drugs, a shabby work ethic, injuries, bad advice, bad eating habits, emotional illnesses, and whatever else I’m forgetting. We know Darius Miles suffered from injuries, we know he dabbled in drugs (or worse), we suspect he suffered from a poor work ethic, and we imagine that his basketball career is now over.

So if you drink a beer tonight, pour out a sip for Miles — NBA bust, marijuana dabbler, physical freak, criminal, and the creator of something far more memorable than his own NBA career: the imaginary horn celebration, a celebration that highlighted Miles’s youth and exuberance and perhaps, just perhaps, the first sign that he was too immature to succeed in the NBA, and maybe even outside it.

During an interview at the Indy Pro-Am, JaJuan Johnson said he would not follow E’Twaun Moore overseas. (h/t CelticsBlog)

“I don’t think I’m going to head to Italy or anything like that,” Johnson said. “I’m definitely waiting it out.

“I think my biggest thing is just really working on my body, and just trying to get better from there. This time — we can really take advantage by working on our game. I think, even though we’re going to miss things on the court, we can be smarter, watching film and things like that, and maybe other rookies don’t have to opportunity to do.”

I doubt we’ll see many (any?) first-round picks go overseas. If the CBA stays the same in regards to rookie contracts, first-round picks have millions of guaranteed dollars waiting for them whenever the lockout ends. Signing overseas and risking that guaranteed money just doesn’t make much sense, unless the overseas contract comes equipped with one hell of an insurance policy.

Last, but certainly not least: put on a blindfold and listen to the JaJuan Johnson interview embedded at the top of this post. Am I crazy, or does he sound just like Donny Marshall?