More from Rivers:

On whether he'll wear a knee brace:

"I'll wear a brace through the whole year, and may wear it from here on out. I wore a brace on both knees in college, every game, and I just kind of got away from it, not for any reason necessarily. ... Definitely this year, and then we'll see how it goes. Fortunately, it's my plant leg rather than my lead leg. That's usually the one that's the most concern.

"The brace and once you get comfortable with it, with my blazing speed it's not going to hinder me too much."

(He was, by the way, kidding.)

On his idea of being conservative in the rehab process:

"Obviously I want to do what's right. They know I want to go, go, go, whenever I can. I've been smart. I really have. I'm not going to do anything silly that can cause a setback and potentially hurt the team and hurt us.

"I've been conservative, but conservatively aggressive. I'm at the stage now that I've got to push it a bit. The knee and all the joints have got to get used to feeling all the movements again. You've got to re-teach your knee what your body does, so you've got to be somewhat aggressive, but at the same time you have to be smart, be choosy. There's no reason to take every rep and every throw just to beat it in the ground. There's that fine line between being too patient and moving on."

On whether he's talked to others, like Carson Palmer, who have had similar surgery:

"I haven't. I've given it some thought about actually maybe giving him a call, or a couple of those guys.

"Obviously, our training staff's had a lot of experience with these injuries. It's not like it's something that's new. You get to the point now where it's starting to feel good and you say, 'All right, what's next?' This is when you've really got to focus in and continue to strengthen it.

"I guess the one thing I didn't realize is that the quad and the calf and the hamstring and all that really leave you (strength-wise). You've got to kind of start from scratch and rebuild it. That has been a lot of the focus. And the toughest part for me is just grinding on some of the same things day in and day out. It gets monotonous a bit, but it'll pay off come training camp and the season."

On his expectations once training camp arrives:

"I don't know what the plan will be. We'll have to see how it goes. Do you go every practice every day? I don't know. Obviously I'm going to want to. We'll see how to manage that. That'll be new to me. But once we get going, there won't be any issues."