MINNEAPOLIS — Brad Stevens is a scientist who now has all of his chemicals to mix.

Brad Stevens is a carpenter who now has the crosscut saw and hammer he’s been missing.

Brad Stevens is a basketball coach who now has all the players with whom he was designing schemes during this past offseason.

The Celtics welcomed Al Horford and Jae Crowder back from injury in Saturday night’s 94-92 road win against the Detroit Pistons, and while those two had started the first three games of the year together, they’d never been in a rotation with Kelly Olynyk, who missed the season’s first six games in the final stages of recovery from shoulder surgery.

Now Stevens gets to act on all his plans.

“This one was a little bit unique because I felt like we couldn’t really do our rotations,” Stevens said after the win in Auburn Hills, Mich., was secured as Horford scored on a follow-up with 1.3 seconds left and blocked an Aron Baynes shot to end the game. “That’s because I felt like Al needed quick breathers. He had to come out quite a bit. And then with Jae, I tried to keep him at six minutes a quarter.”

Still it was a relief for Stevens to have a full complement of weapons at his disposal, even if some of them came with caveats and usage restrictions. He will no doubt be doing further experimentation as he gauges the effectiveness of different combinations and as players improve or decline and work themselves in or out of the playing script accordingly.

But after a summer of projecting how Horford could be used to make the whole better and what a healthy Olynyk could mean to floor spacing and how Terry Rozier’s growth could benefit the club, Stevens is, if not giddy, then at least pleased to be looking forward to the possibilities.

The plans from the summer are now operative.

“I spent more time thinking about that than thinking about what we’d do without them, I can tell you that,” Stevens said. “But you adjust. The playbook’s bigger, for sure, when you’ve got those guys available.”

That thought had taken up residence in the back of his mind when the C’s were waxed in Washington by the Wizards and booed off their own Garden floor in a loss to the Denver Nuggets.

“What I’ve tried to do is keep focused,” Stevens said. “Obviously you’re so focused on the next day and so focused on the next opponent. But I’m also trying to keep in mind the idea that we haven’t been whole and these will be good trials for us later on. You know, we’re playing, like, 13-of-19 on the road (a 12-of-17 stretch that began Saturday). Now we’ve been through some trials. We’ve been stretched in a number of ways. We’ve had to really hone in offensively and defensively on what we need to do, and maybe you don’t go through that in the first three weeks of the season — or at least at the same depth, if you’re healthy.

“My view of this is we build our depth. We build our depth, so that when we have injuries down the road and throughout the season, that these guys have experienced a lot.”

After experiencing the fits and starts of a 6-6 start, the Celtics were feeling optimistic as they looked ahead to tonight’s meeting with the young and talented Minnesota Timberwolves.

“Guys looked good, man,” Amir Johnson said. “Al with a game-winning put-back and the block, Jae coming out and making his first shot and looking good. The team is finally back together. Guys are looking real good. I’m just glad everybody’s healthy. I hate when guys are injured. I like seeing guys out there doing their thing.”

Stevens is happy he gets to do his thing, too, with all the chemicals and tools assigned to him in the offseason.