Dear Doc,

I know you’re thinking about leaving, and I don’t blame you. Family’s a big deal. Two of your sons are going into their senior years. You don’t want to miss big events in your children’s lives, and you don’t want to scar your relationship with your family. I get it. We all do. Long-distance relationships are tough. We understand why you’re so on-the-fence about leaving.

But the Boston Celtics are your family too. Your blood sons are about to begin their senior years of college and high school, but your adopted sons are in the senior years of their NBA career. They’ve been in the trenches with you for three years. They’ve battled for you, with you. They bought into your Ubuntu lesson. They’ve smiled with you, they’ve laughed with you, and they’ve cried with you. Hell, they probably yelled at you a few times too. That’s just what family does. But they won you your first championship. They love you. And they have maybe one or two years of contending left.

With the Celtics, your second family, you have unfinished business. You can’t tell me you’re content with losing Game 7, by four points, to the Lakers. You can’t tell me you don’t want a ring for both hands. You can’t tell me you don’t want to see whether the starting five, when intact, is still worthy of being undefeated. You can’t.

Your family will always be there, Doc. If you retire this year, next year, or five years down the road, your family will still be around. But these Celtics? The Big Three? Five years down the road, probably sooner than that, they’re all going to be retired. You won’t have another chance to coach this group. They’ll be scattered across the country, relaxing. Do you want them to have only one ring a piece? Do you want the last memories you shared with the Big Three to be Ron Artest draining clutch threes and Kobe Bryant accepting an award from Bill Russell? Is that really how you want your time as a Boston Celtics coach to end?

Look, Doc, I’m getting a little desperate here. Do you know who is one of two candidates likely to replace you if you leave? Vinny Del Negro. I don’t mean to make this about anyone else but you, Doc, but do you really want to leave your Celtics in Del Negro’s hands? Do you really want to subject them to his comedy of errors? Don’t you care about your players more than that? Don’t you love them like sons?

I’ve gotta admit, Doc, I once wanted you gone. At the time, after you coached Gerald Green and Sebastian Telfair to a 24-58 record, I didn’t realize you were coaching a bunch of incompetent losers. I blamed you, at least partially. I couldn’t imagine why Danny Ainge extended your contract.

But now I know. Damn, do I know. As skeptical as I once was, I trust you like hell now. You’ve been through the ups and downs in Boston, Doc, but you persevered and came out royalty. I mean it, Doc, you’re Celtics royalty now. You pull all the right strings. Your players love you. The fans do too. We need you.

We need you.

Please.

With love and respect,
Jay King and the Celtics Town community

Gerald Green may not have been wanted by Doc Rivers, but he sure can fly. Here is a Russian dunk contest featuring Green and the world’s best dunker, James White.

Anybody else of the opinion that this is an odd picture?

As Zach Lowe pointed out in his Saturday Notebook, Doc Rivers was quoted in a story about David Lee to have lobbied for drafting Lee rather than Gerald Green.  (Sports Illustrated)

Rivers was a fan of Lee’s and begged the Celtics to acquire him in the 2005 draft. “It’s the one I stuck my chest out about because I was in the minority in the draft room that night,” said Rivers. “But I had the advantage of being in Florida and I’d seen him, and my oldest son had played in a ton of pickup games with him and he said, ‘All I know about David Lee is every time I play a pickup game, his team wins.’

“But he’s even better than I thought he could be because he has a high basketball IQ, and his quickness is so much better than you thought it could be.”

For those of you who don’t remember, the Celtics drafted Green with the 18th pick that year, and the Knicks scooped Lee with the 30th pick.

Lee is a nice player.  He rebounds like an animal, works hard at all times, and is relentless around the rim.  He’s also added a midrange game that’s made him — along with his work around the hoop — very tough to defend.  To be honest, he’s a lot, lot, lot, lot better than Gerald Green.

But I wonder if Doc’s son now says, “All I know about David Lee is every time I see him play an NBA game, his team loses.”

I think the guy on the right would have no trouble posting up Nate Robinson.

Just a brief preview of tonight’s game. It IS St. Paddy’s Day, after all. Actually, it’s not really a preview at all.

Instead, I’ll give you a couple links that I find St. Paddy-ish.

1. First is a list of one man’s top ten favorite Celtics of the past 25 years. I’m pretty skeptical the author is actually a Celtics fan: While leaving Paul Pierce off the list, he includes Dino Radja, Gerald Green, Joe Johnson, and Chauncey Billups, Andrew DeClerq and Vitaly Potapenko. I guess he really has a spot in his heart for guys who never panned out as Celtics. I was surprised he didn’t include Mikki Moore. (Dime Mag)

2. No matter what you think of Rasheed Wallace, these are some pretty sick kicks. (Ball Don’t Lie) There are more Celtics kicks, too.

3. Rajon Rondo still doesn’t think the Celtics can be beat.  (Celtics Hub) Funny, I remember the C’s saying the same thing last year, even when KG was down.

4. Happy St. Patrick’s Day from The Basketball Jones.  You might remember the first guy on the list.  In fact, you probably despise him.

5. This has nothing to do with basketball, but everything to do with crackheads, amateur sketches, and leprechauns.

On another note, there actually will be a game tonight. But it’s against the Knicks, and I’m thinking that not even all the luck of the Irish in the world could help the Knicks tumble the Celtics. Well, I hope.

Yes, a million times over. It was worth it.

NBA.com’s Shaun Powell raises a question that will continue to be thrown out there if the C’s continue their slide:

Was their one title worth mortgaging the future?

A few years ago, the Celtics revamped their team for a championship run by assembling three pricey players. Now that it appears their “run” will amount to a single title, was their $175 million-plus investment worth it?

Meaning: How much would you (and should you) pay for a championship? No question, the 2008 title restored faith in the franchise, raised a 17th title banner in Boston, sold plenty of season tickets, rekindled memories of Red Auerbach’s cigar and the Larry Bird era and added another chapter to the Celtics’ rich history. The Celtics “brand” received a boost, and that’s something you really can’t put a price on.

Still, the Celtics paid dearly for that small taste of the good life. The championship did not spawn a lengthy stretch of prosperity. They’re aging faster than a father with teenaged daughters.

So was it worth it, even if the Celtics are falling apart like they’ve appeared to be for large portions of the season?

In a word, yes.

In another word, abso – f**king – lutely.

The Celtics won a title, ladies and gentlemen. In the NBA, those are usually few and far between. Just ask Knicks fans or Timberwolves fans. To us Celtics fans, the title run wasn’t about rekindling memories, it was about making them. And it damn sure wasn’t about selling tickets. No matter what the cost to Steve Pagliuca and Wyc Grousbeck, winning the title was worth it.

Plus, look at the alternative:

The Celtics keep Al Jefferson and their #5 draft pick, select Yi Jianlian (who was reportedly Ainge’s choice if he kept the pick), and hold onto the young “building blocks” for the future (Gerald Green and Bassy Telfair, I’m looking at you). They roll out a lineup of a Paul Pierce (disgruntled), Ryan Gomes (solid, nowhere near as good as most Celtics fans would have you think), Al Jefferson (who would soon get an injury and pick up a DWI), and Rajon Rondo and Kendrick Perkins (who wouldn’t have matured nearly as quickly without both the tutelage of KG and Ray-Ray and the intensity of playoff basketball). Tony Allen, Telfair, Delonte West and Yi are the first four men off the bench. The C’s fight for a playoff berth, finish just out of the playoffs, and draft someone like Brandon Rush with their late-lottery pick.

The next year, they again flounder but remain close to the playoffs, and pick up someone like Earl Clark in the draft. They don’t have a lot of salary, and Paul Pierce gets traded away to clear even more salary space. But with an inconsistent Rajon Rondo (remember, he wouldn’t have advanced nearly as quickly) and an injury-prone Al Jefferson as the team’s top draws for free agents, plus the city of Boston still not a prime target for anyone, the Celtics lose out on the top stars of the 2010 Free Agent Class. They settle for overpaying Joe Johnson or Rudy Gay, players who will never win titles as the main guy, and begin another run of mediocrity.

Granted, that’s just one hypothetical. But doesn’t the present sound a whole lot better than that? Winning a title, then clinging to hopes of another, is far better than hoping all the cards fall into place for the future.

Once in a while, someone else’s article catches my eye. Sometimes, it’s because the article is so spot-on I wish I’d written it myself. Other times, it’s because the article enlightens me with something I never knew. Still other times, it’s because I disagree with whatever’s written. No matter what the reason, I dish it off to another writer to make his/her point. You know, throwing some dimes.

1. Celtics Hub’s Zach Lowe went to the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.

Cuban: “Some guys in our sport are morons. You want to dump them on another team.” Cuban said teams try to conceal the fact that some of their guys are “morons” in a scheme he called “protect the moron.” He suggested that teams should “out the morons.”

Cuban returned to this theme later in discussing Gerald Green: “Oh my God,” he said. He then talked about Green’s athleticism before concluding that Green “just doesn’t understand the game of basketball.”

The crowd laughed.

I wonder what Cuban thinks of Tony Allen?

2. Celtics die-hard KWAPT had the day of his life. It included watching Rajon Rondo tear Scal apart in a game of one-on-one.

3. CelticsBlog’s Jeff Clark compares following the Celtics to marriage.

This doesn’t mean that you love each other any less. Just the opposite.

What develops is a more mature love. A more unconditional love. When you can look at someone and really know them top to bottom, knowing everything imperfect about them and still truly love them without hesitation, that’s mature love. When you’ve been through many, many tough times together, you know that you can get through the next one together and you find a deeper respect for each other because of it.

4. ESPNBoston’s Chris Forsberg had a nice quote from Kevin Garnett.

And Garnett might as well have been talking about the season as a whole when he noted, “It’s not about how you start, it’s how you finish. Obviously, we’d like to have had more energy in the first half. You look, we shot 41 percent [for the game], we really didn’t play well. But when it came down to getting stops, it was in our favor.”

Far too often, the Celtics’ have flipped the switch a minute or two too late, leaving too little time for a comeback to be completed. For once, they started a comeback and had enough time to finish the job. It doesn’t get rid of the first 42 minutes, but it sure feels better to win, especially the way Boston won: With defense.

5. Rasheed Wallace has a combined three attempted three-pointers in his last three games. That happens about as often as the Minnesota Timberwolves win the NBA championship.

Wanna throw your own dime, and get someone’s article recognized? Email me at jayking@celticstown.com or follow me on Twitter.