Shortly after signing a five-year contract extension, Doc Rivers will undergo minor throat surgery to remove a non-cancerous growth. He had a similar surgery (the same surgery?) after last season, when he thought the growths might have been cancerous. At the time, he explained that coaches are more susceptible to such growths because they yell so much. And after the last two regular seasons, Doc has had plenty to yell about.

In other news, I worry for Tom Thibodeau’s throat.

Moving on to basketball tidbits, Rivers admitted the Celtics need to revamp their bench. Which is similar to saying Andris Biedrins and Ben Wallace would like a new free throw form, or Avery Johnson would like a new voice—easier said than done. An improved bench would take the pressure off the Big Three and leave them with more energy later in the game. This past season, because Glen Davis and Jeff Green were as useful as an umbrella on a perfect day, the Big Three had too much responsibility. Once, they could handle that. But now they are too close to receiving their AARP cards. Speaking of Davis, Rivers claimed he had no problem with the undersized yet oversized power forward. But, “He may have had a problem with me. He just wasn’t playing well late in the season. The first half of the season he was playing the best ball of his career, and then he just fell off of that.” No kidding.

Rivers knows switching eras seamlessly and maintaining status as a contender will be difficult (and could come very soon). But he swears there is a path the team can take to keep from rebuilding.

“I don’t want it to get to that — I’ll put it that way,” he said. “Whether that happens or not is something we’re going to find out. Hopefully, we can avoid that. There’s a path to avoid it, though it won’t be easy to follow. We just have to see what we can do.”

Fell well, Doc. And reload, don’t rebuild.

Doc Rivers could have retired to spend time with his family. He could have allowed his contract to expire and immediately taken the reins of another team. He could have taken one year off and chosen whatever job opening he wanted. But it wouldn’t have felt right. Not after the loyalty the Celtics showed him four years ago, when he was coming off a 24-58 season and the town of Boston wanted his head.  Not after four years of coaching a group that could rival his fierce competitive streak. Not after all the elating wins and devastating losses and time spent building relationships with his players.

He couldn’t turn on Danny Ainge now, nor could he turn on Steve Pagliuca, Wyc Grousbeck, Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, or Ray Allen. Even with the franchise’s uncertain future looming like an approaching storm, even though he could have chosen any other coaching job in the league, Rivers signed a five-year contract extension to stay in Boston.

“It would have been easier to do it the other way,” he told WEEI during an interview. “I just don’t think it’s the right thing to do. Coaches talk about loyalty and team all the time. I just thought it was time to show it. And that’s what I did.”

The future does worry Rivers. He knows the Big Three are becoming moldy as they approach their expiration date, and has already begun devising ways to maximize their production.

“Kevin Garnett, for example,” he said. “Instead of playing him two stints in a half, which is equal to 32 minutes, you have to play him five-minute increments to let him play with his pure power, give him a rest, bring him back in. I think substituting him that way will keep him fresher longer.”

Even with fewer minutes dispersed in different intervals, Rivers sees next year as the Big Three’s final run. He knows they can still produce like superstars on occasion—think Garnett’s 28-point, 18-rebound performance in Game 3—but the days when they could do that every game are over. A passing of the torch will occur soon. The Big Three will retire or they will become bit pieces, and Ainge will need to surround Rajon Rondo with new superstars if the Celtics plan to skip a long-term rebuilding process reminiscent of the Gerald Green days. If it comes to that rebuilding, Rivers is willing to stick around for that. But he hopes it won’t be necessary.

“Who says that we still can’t [reload] with free agency and adding the right pieces?” he asked. “While our Big Three are getting older, we have to add the right supporting cast to them. In that transition, hopefully we can still chase what we want.”

The Celtics presumably want titles, or at least long playoff runs that extend until late May or some time in June. Rivers wants that too, of course, but looks to a man who doesn’t have a single title as one of his coaching role models. Jerry Sloan spent 22 title-less years coaching the Utah Jazz. He became almost synonymous with John Stockton and Karl Malone, but outlasted his two superstars to rebuild the Jazz almost from scratch. Even in Utah’s rebuilding years Sloan kept them competitive; he had only one losing season during his entire Utah career. He never won a Coach of the Year Award (he was no Sam Mitchell, after all) and never did win a ring, but Sloan set the blueprint for long-tenured coaches.

“I look at the Utah situation and Jerry Sloan,” said Rivers. “And I look at the situation in San Antonio. Danny and I were talking — those are the two more stable franchises, because they’ve had the same coach and the same GM and the same ownership. They’ve been able to draft well, scout well, pick the right players for the system because they’ve known the system. When we talked about it, that’s what we want to do.”

Five years ago I was finishing up my AP Statistics final project so I could graduate from prep school. Raef LaFrentz and Ricky Davis started for the Celtics. I weighed 35 fewer pounds, still played basketball competitively, hated writing, and wore a set of metal braces on my teeth. Yes, I still had braces during my fifth (and final) year of high school. During home games after I would make a nice play, the crowd used to chant pro-metal mouth refrains: “He’s got braces, he’s got braces, he’s got braces… and you don’t!” Looking back, it probably wasn’t my proudest moment. The point is, a lot happens in five years.

There’s so much uncertainty in Boston’s future. How many productive years do the Big Three have left? Who will the Celtics sign to team with Rondo? Will Dwight Howard or another superstar consider Boston and the cold winters? More immediately, will Ainge re-sign Jeff Green, Nenad Krstic or Glen Davis? And perhaps most importantly, do the Celtics have a rebuilding process in their short-term prognosis, or will they simply reload?

Even though coaching contracts aren’t always honored, only one thing seems certain about the Celtics’ future: Doc Rivers will lead the way. There’s plenty left to figure out, but at least that’s a pretty good start.

In the latest development in the NBA labor talks, the NBA owners have proposed a $45 million hard salary cap while also pressing for non-guaranteed player contracts. That would mean cutting the current $58 million soft cap by almost 25%. Needless to say, the Players Association isn’t thrilled with the proposal. (AOL Sporting News)

The details, spelled out in an April 26 memo issued by National Basketball Players Association Executive Director Billy Hunter, marks the league’s push for a major overhaul of the NBA’s economic model and emphasizes to players an aggressive bid to significantly slash costs and shorten contracts.

The memo was sent to all NBA players and was dated just days prior to the league delivering to the union a new labor proposal, which a source said still included the $45 million hard cap but added a phase-in of the cap over a few years. Union president Derek Fisher publicly dismissed the latest proposal as too similar to the original proposal.

The memo’s most eye-popping element is the league’s proposed $45 million hard cap, which cuts the current $58 million soft cap by nearly 25 percent.

Hunter said in the memo that the NBA projects the $45 million hard cap number with a team’s total salary not to exceed the cap for any reason. The proposed hard cap as outlined by Hunter also would eliminate the current luxury tax provision, which penalizes teams with a dollar-for-dollar tax for the amount spent on player payroll exceeding the salary cap.

The proposed hard cap is something the NBA has never had under collective bargaining, but it has become a critical element to owners. This initial proposal, and its steep cut in player cap space, demonstrates a strong commitment by the owners to dramatically curtail player payrolls while also supporting NBA Commissioner David Stern’s mantra of making the league more profitable.

The inclusion of non-guaranteed player contracts, while a negotiating point, also represents a radical shift for players who have long benefited from guaranteed deals. Taken together, Hunter felt compelled to send out the missive.

“The nature of the owners’ demands is so onerous that I feel it is imperative to reinforce the message of our recent team meetings with this letter,” Hunter wrote in the memo.

The Players Association and the owners are driving 95 MPH straight towards each other, and the upcoming collision could be destructive. For the record, I’m siding with the players. Nobody put a gun to David Kahn’s head and forced him to sign Darko Milicic to a $20 million contract. Nobody held a knife to Mickael Prokorov’s neck and forced him to commit $35 million worth of checks to Travis Outlaw. Nobody tortured Isiah Thomas until he inked Jerome James to a $30 million deal. NBA teams have lost money because they’ve screwed up, time and time again, not because the salary cap was too high.

Somebody needs to clone 30 Sam Prestis. Then every team can make intelligent personnel decisions, keep their costs to a minimum and build toward a promising future, all with a soft cap that will allow for players to maintain happiness. Basketball talent is at least as good now as it ever has been. It’s the owners who are failing their fan bases, and now they want to bandage their bad decisions by taking money out of the players’ pockets.

Editor’s note: Yesterday, I discussed the possibility of using this space to pimp my new book. After some mixed feedback, all of which I appreciated, I decided to give you a sneak preview. This is the first chapter of the book, which I started writing yesterday.

Let me know what you think, and also let me know whether you’d like open threads for the remaining playoff games. It might be fun to vent about the Heat, ogle about Taj Gibson’s dunk, or shed some tears while thinking about what might have been.

Thank you all, for everything. And yes, the picture above is me when I was in high school. If only Jeff Green could box out with such impeccable form.

–Jay

*****

In retrospect, I should have chosen a different sport. Basketball rewards leaping ability, quickness and height, and if genetics were any hint, I was destined to strike out in all three categories.

My dad stands 5’11 (though he’d get mad at me for calling him less than 6’0) and his jump shot looks like a rabid dog having a seizure. He played hockey when he was younger and will tell anyone who will listen about the time his firm hip check toppled the best player in his high school league. But if you wanted to pick someone to breed a world-class basketball player, my father would be near the back of the line, standing somewhere in the vicinity of Danny DeVito. This is the time he would want me to mention that he was not useless athletically; he set his city’s record in the mile run when he was only thirteen years old, and he was captain of both his hockey team and golf team in high school (he still brags about the one glorious day he shot in the 60s). That stuff is all true. But when it came to passing down height and fast-twitch muscle fibers that would help me become an NBA player one day, he failed me. Quite woefully, I might add. The man couldn’t jump over a sheet of paper.

All my athleticism, if you can call it that, came from my mother. Or at least, that’s what she tells me. A series of injuries stemming from a ruptured disc in her neck kept my mom from displaying all the athletic feats she claimed she could do. She was great at tennis, she says. She was the best water-skier ever, she tells me. She could lift entire houses with just her pinky finger, her self-proclaimed legend states. She was the most impressive synchronized swimmer Massachusetts has ever seen, she brags, the very definition of grace. But I remember more than she gives me credit for. When I was about eight years old, back before the injuries took away all my mother’s “athleticism,” I watched her play tennis. She stood in the middle of the court, refusing to move side to side, hoping her opponent would hit the ball straight back to her. Anything outside of her arm’s reach was a winner.

As you can probably tell, reaching the NBA was outside the realm of possibility from the day I was conceived. Not that I let that keep me from dreaming. When I was young, I believed my path to the NBA was already blazed; I just had to follow it. I was going to play for Coach K at Duke, then get drafted by the Celtics during the first round, probably in the lottery. I would become the hometown hero. Women would want me. Men would want to be me. Children would want my autograph. Somebody would probably make a movie out of my life. Of course, those dreams never materialized. If they ever do make a movie about my basketball career, it will be called “His Airless.” When you’re destined to be a short, slow white boy for your entire life, the NBA probably isn’t for you.

I did dabble in other sports. I tried soccer, like most suburban children do, and I was phenomenal. No, really, I was—I once scored 41 goals in a single game. Of course, I was seven years old at the time, played in a league that did not allow goalies, and my opponents were probably blind. But I scored 41 freaking goals in one game. You can never take that away from me. Nonetheless, I hated soccer. There was something about it that bored me to death (probably the fact that World Cup games could actually end in scoreless ties). So I quit on top, before my town’s league allowed goalies.

Baseball didn’t bore me as much as soccer did. Some people might hate baseball’s lack of action, but I found a way around it: play pitcher and catcher, and only pitcher and catcher. I was involved in every play and boredom didn’t set in nearly as often; I never had to pick my wedgies during long innings in the outfield. I was actually pretty good at baseball. I batted something like .700 in Little League, pitched a few no-hitters and became the most-feared baserunner in the league. We weren’t allowed to lead off the base once the pitcher toed the rubber. But by waiting until the perfect time (when the catcher started to put his mask back on and the pitcher’s back was facing the plate), I managed to steal home more than ten times in my final year. What I’m not mentioning is that I was in 7th grade and almost 13 years old, playing against a lot of nine- and ten-year old opponents. I was kind of like Danny Almonte, except at least in my case being the proverbial man among boys was actually legal. When I finally could have graduated to a full-sized diamond, in 8th grade, I stopped playing baseball. Not because I was afraid of playing against kids my own age (how dare you accuse me of being a coward?), but because AAU basketball was played in the spring and I didn’t have time to play two sports. It’s worth noting that I did make a brief return to baseball during my freshman year of high school. Playing for my school’s freshman team, I pitched only one inning, striking out four players. No, that’s not a typo, and yes, I am tooting my own horn. One inning, four strikeouts, and my high school baseball career was finished forever. I’d chosen basketball instead.

Actually, saying I chose basketball isn’t right. It chose me. I was born with older cousins and I looked up to them. In fact, saying I worshiped them might be more accurate. When I was young, I would have jumped into a school of jellyfish if my older cousins told me to. Once, I really did.

We had created something we called “The Man’s Club.” Basically, my older cousins came up with dares for the rest of us. If we completed the dares, we gained entrance to The Man’s Club. If we failed to complete them, we were scorned for a day or two, until the next dare came along and we had another chance at admission to the honorable club. Our places in The Man’s Club were very tenous—as soon as my older cousins thought of the next dare, our previous accomplishments were forgotten and we needed to prove our manhood all over again.

Once, we dared my cousin Mike to enter “The Torture Chamber,” which actually meant he had to lay down under some couch cushions so the rest of us could jump on him. Not our brightest idea; Mike broke his arm. Later, on a family vacation at the beach, we dared one of my cousins to take a shit in his pants (I’ll leave his name out of this in an attempt to save his reputation). He did, but, needless to say, Nameless Cousin’s father wasn’t as pleased as he should have been by his son’s entrance into the Man’s Club. Nameless Cousin spent the rest of the vacation grounded and confined to his bedroom, crying tears of shame.

During that same summer, we swam out to a raft in the ocean and were surrounded by a school of jellyfish. My cousins told me to jump in and swim to shore. Rather than responding with an intelligent, “No,” I simply asked, “Is there anything else you’d like me to do?” There was nothing else. Apparently, jumping into a pack of 20 or so jellyfish and getting stung dozens of times was enough to prove my manhood. Until, you know, my older cousins thought of a new dare, at which time my manhood would be entirely forgotten.

My cousins Pat and Billy, especially, were older, taller and, in my eyes at least, the next Larry Birds. They always raved about Bird. To them, he was the perfect basketball player. He was the most talented player on the court; he knew it, his opponents knew it, and the fans knew it. If there was somebody in attendance who didn’t know it, Bird had no problem telling them himself. But he still dove after loose balls. He still did all he could to get his teammates involved. To Larry, basketball wasn’t just a game. It was something holy, something he needed to respect and something everybody else should respect, too. Watching him play, it was evident that Larry cared about winning basketball games like a groom should care about his bride. My cousins dug that. And it didn’t hurt that Bird played in Boston while we grew up in the Western part of the state. Bird was their favorite player and basketball was their favorite sport. It was only a matter of time until it was my favorite sport, too.

I can still vividly remember the night I fell in love with basketball. At least, I think I remember it vividly. I might have glorified my memory through the years, altering my recollections to make this one night seem more important than it actually was. Or maybe I remember it exactly as I saw it but still don’t get all the details right; after all, that night I was watching basketball through the lens of a five-year old. At that age, you don’t always understand everything that happens. Anyway, on to the story.

Billy was playing in a high school game against Travis Best’s high school, Central High School. I’m not sure whether Travis, who would later earn fame as an Indiana Pacer, was on the team that year. He might have already graduated high school, after which he attended Georgia Tech. Either way, I was wearing a plain white t-shirt adorned with magic marker. My mom had written “Martin” (Billy’s last name) and “33″ (Billy’s number—an homage to Bird, obviously) on the back of my plain white t-shirt. On the front, she wrote “Cathedral” (Billy’s high school team). Wearing my brand new jersey (of sorts), I cheered until my voice sounded like I had inhaled cigarette smoke for 650 straight hours.

But Billy’s team didn’t respond to my cheers, at least initially. They fell down by about 20 points. The stands were so packed that a hundred or so people sat on the floor to watch the game. At least half the crowd supported the home team, Central High School, Billy’s opponent.

“It’s all over,” they chanted. “It’s all over.”

The floor boards quivered like a man waiting to get punched in the face by Mike Tyson. Billy’s team looked just as shaken as those floor boards. That was okay by me. His team didn’t need to win for me to idolize Billy. He was 6’6 with range that extended well beyond the three-point arc. He could pass like a point guard, played varsity basketball all four years of high school, and, since I had never been to a college or NBA game, was the closest thing to Larry Bird I had ever seen in person.

Billy was good enough that one local basketball aficionado would later compare him to Vinny Del Negro. ”He would have had Vinny’s NBA career if he had just learned to follow his shot,” the aficionado said. Okay, so maybe Aficionado’s judgment wasn’t perfect; he later told me without any hint of sarcasm that a local high school player (who never even played college basketball) was better than the San Antonio Spurs’ Chris Quinn. Yeah, right. And if my cousin simply followed his shot, he would have had a 12-year NBA career. Have another brew, Aficionado. But I digress. Back to Billy’s game.

The game was all but over, a loss all but certain. Billy’s team was being drowned by an uber-athletic Central team and the chants of opposing fans. Of course, they could have lost by 100 points and I still would have returned home thinking, “Man, did you see Billy’s no-look pass? He’s the best player I’ve ever seen.” But the Cathedral Panthers didn’t lose by 100 points.

Central’s lead didn’t slowly dwindle; Cathedral flushed it down the toilet in one quick motion. Like a dead fish, the lead almost instantly disappeared to wherever flushed toilet water goes. The “It’s all over” chants washed away and the Cathedral fans seized control of that overfilled gym.

“Score-board, score-board,” sang the chorus. My cousin Billy had helped lead the comeback, and he was a star. Thousands of people chanted for him. Thousands of people paid money to watch him play a basketball game. I sat there in my de facto jersey, my eyes bouncing with excitement, falling head over heels for Billy and the game he loved. One day, I made up my mind right then and there, people would cheer for me just like that. One day, basketball would help me become a star.

I never would realize the latter goal, but the game has given me more than I ever could have hoped. My friends, my family, my education; if my life were a plain white T-shirt, basketball has always been imprinted on top of it with magic marker.

What would my life have become if I never fell in love with basketball? I don’t know. All I know is that it would have been different. Very different.

In an interview with WEEI, Doc Rivers said he expects Nenad Krstic to re-sign with the Celtics.

“I think we’ll get him back and he’ll help us in the future,” said Rivers.

With the Celtics searching for some way to improve their middling offense (it ranked 17th in efficiency this past season), Krstic could help. Re-signing him might make a lot of sense; though the thought of signing Krstic  long-term fails to bring tears of joy to my eyes, Shaq and Jermaine O’Neal are both contemplating retirement (Rivers said he expects Shaq to retire, though Shaq hasn’t said so—wait, didn’t Shaq retire in February?) and Glen Davis seems likely to relocate this summer. Given that the Celtics will have little cap room to sign outside free agents (depending on the new CBA), Krstic might be the best option. And yes, that sound you hear is me gagging.

Moving back to Glen Davis, Rivers believes the impending free agency changed Davis’s mindset and contributed to his poor play of late.

“Scoring was way too important to him, instead of being who he is,” Rivers said. He wouldn’t mind seeing Davis return to Boston, but only if the Celtics can A) get him at the right price and B) return his mind to a happy place.

In his own understated way, Rivers threw Ainge (and his midseason trade) under an 18-wheeler traveling 85 miles per hour. Rivers didn’t think the personnel moves were necessarily bad; he just felt the timing was wrong. Asked whether he would have done the trade again, he said, “I’d wait until after the year is over.” In the middle of the season, adding a slew of new players set the Celtics back like the day we switch from Daylight Savings Time.

Rivers reiterated Danny Ainge’s belief that if Jeff Green returns next season, there’s a possibility he might supplant Paul Pierce in the starting lineup. That plan sounds worse than the time I played an April Fool’s joke on my high school principal. I won’t go into details, but she called me into her office later in the day; two policemen were waiting to speak to me. That was when I realized I might have gone a little too far.

In the aftermath of a postseason exit that was all-too-early, I have a dilemma: I don’t know what I want to write about this summer. And I need your advice.

Obviously, I’ll write about the most important rumors (such as “Celtics work out Adam Morrison,” or “Danny Ainge interested in Kwame Brown”). I’ll write about any offseason signings, retirements, trades, et cetera. I’ve got a few series planned, such as a breakdown of each player’s season and a “go-to move” feature for Boston’s Fab Four (you’ll learn more about that later; it should be fun).

But for day-to-day site maintenance, I need your help. I’m pondering a couple routes.

1) I could delve deeper into analysis of daily news tidbits. For example, I would write about what the Celtics’ preference of James Harden (rather than Jeff Green) in the Perk trade meant. I would write about whether the Celtics should want to bring Nenad Krstic back, after he finished the season somewhere between “disappointing” and “we never expected anything, anyway, so he was what we thought he was.” I would write about the ramifications of the news—what it means, other paths the Celtics could choose to take, yada yada yada.

But so much analysis over such miniature issues hardly seems worth my time. If you noticed, a couple months ago I tried to stop paying attention to the small picture stuff and started focusing more on the big picture. Sadly, now that the big picture will be slowed down for quite some time, the small picture is all that’s left. Which leads me to my second option, the one I’m leaning toward but want your feedback on:

2) I want to start writing a book on the site. It wouldn’t be about the Celtics, though they would certainly be mentioned frequently. Rather, it would be about how basketball has helped shape my life, beginning somewhere in my early youth and ending after my final high school game (the college years, believe me, are worthy of a sequel to this first book). I’m thinking about writing this book on the site, obviously in its most “rough draft” form, available to all for free. I would write one chapter at a time, maybe two or three chapters per day. But I want to check what you guys think, because it would mean failing to address a lot of the smaller Celtics issues this offseason (though I would still certainly address all the larger ones).

The choice is yours. Let me know.