Yo, Adrian!

Adrian Griffin will join fellow former Celtic Tom Thibodeau’s staff in Chicago. (Journal Times)

Now, two years later, Griffin has beaten the odds again. Monday, he was on the verge of being hired as a bench coach for new Bulls coach Tom Thibodeau.

At 36, Griffin will become one of the youngest bench coaches in the NBA.

“I am very fortunate,” Griffin said. “I was just a player two years ago and now I’m a coach. It’s very competitive to make an NBA team as a player, but it’s even more competitive to become an NBA coach. There are only a few of them (usually five) on each team.

“God has been good to me.”

Those who don’t remember Griffin from his Celtics days are probably trying to forget some of the worst years in Celtics history. But Griffin was somebody to root for.

He began his professional basketball career by being undrafted after graduating Seton Hall. He then spent three years playing in Italy and the CBA, toiling in basketball’s minor leagues and honing his craft. Finally, in 1999, the Celtics gave him his chance. Though he never posted great stats, Griffin wouldn’t disappoint.

He was the rare NBA player who couldn’t shoot and couldn’t dribble, wasn’t athletic and wasn’t too tall, but still managed to carve himself a role on most teams he played for. And I say the previous sentence with the utmost respect. It’s not a bad thing that Griffin had very few skills; it’s merely remarkable that he was able to overcome his many shortcomings to succeed in the best basketball league in the world. He used grit, intelligence and pure heart to play nine seasons in the NBA, never impressing casual fans but always earning a spot in coaches’ hearts. If you can’t respect a player like Griffin, you don’t value hard work.

I’m sure the qualities that helped him stay in the NBA are now the same ones making him one of the NBA’s youngest bench coaches. Congrats, Adrian. If you don’t become a hell of a coach, I’m positive it won’t be due to lack of effort.

A. Sherrod Blakely writes that the Celtics’ offseason additions symbolize a change in philosophy. According to Blakely, gone are the days of lockdown defense and shutting down opponents. The Celtics will still focus on stopping teams from scoring, but realize they’ll have to score more points themselves to win games. (CSNNE)

The moves made by the C’s this summer signal not just a new season, but a new vision for success.

Instead of relying so heavily on defensive stops to win, rendering teams defenseless against an onslaught of shooters will likely be their modus operandi for victories this season.

When you look at the pieces added this summer and those that are no longer around, it’s clear the C’s are looking to outshoot, and not necessarily shut down, opponents.

The Celtics have lost their resident around-the-basket banger, Kendrick Perkins (right knee), for most of the season. Replacing him in the starting lineup will likely be Jermaine O’Neal, a solid defender but a definite notch or two below Perkins.

Rasheed Wallace has called it career for the C’s, robbing Boston of one of the more underrated low post defenders of the past decade.

And his replacement?

Shaquille O’Neal, one of the most dominant offensive players of this generation whose defense . . . is what it is.

The Celtics’ defense on the perimeter isn’t all that much better, either.

I respect the hell out of A. Sherrod Blakely, but I couldn’t disagree more strongly with his assessment. The Celtics lost Perkins… but when the playoffs come around he’ll be in the lineup. The Celtics signed Jermaine O’Neal to replace Rasheed Wallace… and O’Neal is an infinitely better defender than the Sheed we saw most of last season. The Celtics lost Tony Allen… but reportedly tried their hardest to keep him, and replaced him with two players — Delonte West and Von Wafer — who are known as solid defenders.  Shaq sucks at the pick-and-roll… so Doc Rivers has spent the entire summer devising a way to hide that weakness.

The Celtics will still start Kevin Garnett and Rajon Rondo, two All-NBA-caliber defenders. When Perk comes back, there will be three All-Defense types in the lineup. The defensive mentality ain’t changing, folks. The Celtics are still going to shut people down. They’re still going to be out to take your heart and limit your scoring. My only concern is that the Celtics will miss Tom Thibodeau more than we realize.

You’ve got to admire a man who can break into the NBA coaching ranks looking like he’s ready to go shoot geese. The Bulls must be pumped, mostly because this is the only picture that could ever allow Joakim Noah to make fun of somebody’s hair.

Free agents are already naming Tom Thibodeau as a reason to sign with the Chicago Bulls. (Chicago Tribune)

Kurt Thomas spent part of Monday afternoon running down the reasons he signed with the Bulls for his 16th NBA season.

One name kept resurfacing: Tom Thibodeau.

“As an assistant, his approach was unbelievable,” said Thomas, who spent five seasons with the new Bulls coach when they were with the Knicks. “He was known for putting in 15-hour days. He’s solid and knows how to talk to players.

“When you see how hard he works, you want to work that hard too. To see his growth over all these years, I think now that he has this (head coaching) opportunity he’ll be very successful.”

Look, I’m with Kurt. Thibodeau will be a good coach in the NBA. He’s too hard-working and too knowledgeable about defense not to be. But I don’t think free agents should be flocking towards Thibs like the beautiful women who instinctively flock like the salmon of Capistrano. Not yet, at least.

Reason #1,489 I know I'm not over the NBA Finals: This picture made me legitimately sad.

In the same piece in which he reported Brad Miller will be the C’s top free agent priority this offseason, Adrian Wojnarowski also reported the Celtics are confident Doc Rivers will be their coach next season. (Yahoo!)

The Celtics are still confident coach Doc Rivers will return for the final year of his contract, and he plans to make a decision this week on whether he will be back for a seventh season or join his family in Orlando.

Rivers has been behaving like a coach who plans to return. He participated in the Celtics’ draft preparation, and he had been working with GM Danny Ainge to prepare for the start of free agency on Thursday. He has also had conversations with prospective candidates to replace Tom Thibodeau on his coaching staff, but that hire is on hold.

Rivers had meetings planned with close associates this week to discuss his future.

That Doc is behaving like a coach who plans to return is good. Then again, he could just be behaving like a decent guy who doesn’t want to leave people he cares about out to dry. I really believe he still hasn’t decided, but I truly hope he decides to come back. If I have to hear Vinny Del Negro mentioned once more as a potential Celtics coach, the cops might as well arrest me before I do something very harmful to human kind.

The Celtics have gotten rid of their morning walkthrough, but that doesn’t mean we have to. Here are a few Celtics links, and maybe even an NBA link or two, to help wake you up and get you focused for the day.

Not even Kobe can win one on five.

Rich Levine, CSNNE – “‘I would say it was the toughest shots that I’ve ever seen somebody hit while I was on the court,’ said Paul Pierce. ‘It was like everything was — he was shooting fadeaway threes, fadeaway jumpers off the double‑team. You knew he was going to come out and be aggressive and try to carry his team. He’s a heck of a player. You’ve got to expect that from him.’ ‘When a player is in that kind of mode, man, you just put a hand up and you trap him and you do different things,’ said Kevin Garnett. ‘Other than that, you’re at their mercy.’ But as the points piled up, and Bryant’s legend grew, an interesting thing happened. The symbolism screamed louder than the 20,000 fans packed into the Garden. The juxtaposition was absolutely perfect. Over and over. Possession after possession. One vs. Five. Me vs. We. Kobe vs. the Celtics. And the Celtics were winning. Team was winning.”

Henry Abbott, ESPN TrueHoop – “A single win from an NBA championship, Rivers is prepared to joke about what a poor job his team — which has both Kendrick Perkins and Rasheed Wallace a single technical foul from an automatic one-game suspension — has done keeping level-headed. ‘That tells you how screwed up we are,’ says Rivers with a wry smile. ‘Kevin Garnett is calming our team down. It’s funny now, but it was Kevin and Tony Allen in the huddle telling everyone to calm down. I jokingly told [assistant coach] Armond [Hill] this is a crazy basketball team right here.’ Rivers finally concludes: ‘I don’t know if calming down and us goes together.’”

Bill Plaschke, LA Times – “So this is what the wall looks like. Sickly green, bulging with elbows, dripping with sweat, a solid sheet of basketball will. So this is how the Lakers look with backs flattened against it. Kobe Bryant screaming, Ron Artest bricking, Pau Gasol disappearing, Andrew Bynum limping, Lamar Odom smiling? ‘We’ll respond,’ he said. You will? How? If the Lakers’ answer is anything like it was on this steamroller of a Sunday night at TD Garden, they will soon end their season with a loud and pronounced cry of uncle.”

Bob Ryan, Boston Globe – “Doc Rivers knew there was a Kobe Bryant bomb planted somewhere in this series. ‘I hope so,’ he said after watching the maestro score 23 consecutive Lakers points in this one, beginning with the last 4 of the second quarter and the first 19 of the second half. ‘It’s amazing what that does to your team. We’re up 12, and I’ve got to call a timeout to settle down our guys.’ It was a great show, all right. But it’s just a footnote in Lakers history. Despite those 23 straight, and despite his series-high 38, the Celtics were once again a far better T-E-A-M, and with last night’s 92-86 victory they will head back to Los Angeles one game from another NBA championship. More and more the story of this series is the breadth and depth of the Celtics, who have not relied on any one, two, or even five players to grab this 3-2 series lead.”

Chris Forsberg, ESPN Boston – “”From the standpoint that he’s providing points for his team and he’s in a rhythm, it’s a bit dangerous,” Garnett said. “But for the rhythm of his team, then it works in our favor. I can’t even come up with any kind of words because his flow is just deliberate. He was very keen on what he wanted to do; he got the shots that he wanted. I thought the second half he was really keen and hitting 3s. He was in a nice rhythm. ‘I thought for the most part we pretty much controlled everybody else, but in that scenario you put your hand up and play the best [defense] that you can. Strategically, all our defensive schemes and stuff that we have, you just hope that he misses.’ He hardly did, connecting on seven of nine shots overall in the frame for half of his game-high 38 points. But it didn’t matter. The supporting cast was 3-of-10 for seven points with only two other players generating buckets. Meanwhile, Boston combined for 12-of-19 shooting for 28 points with five contributors. ‘They played with more tenacity than we did in that stretch,’ Bryant said. ‘And we have to do a much better job Game 6.’ It’s clear Los Angeles can’t win if it’s five against one. It’s simply not a fair battle. Even if it’s the best shooter in the world.”

Arash Markazi, ESPN Los Angeles – “‘I thought we played pretty well,’ said Artest, who had 7 points, on 2-of-9 shooting, and two rebounds. ‘The games that we lost here, they were close. It wasn’t like a couple years ago where the game was a blowout. We played good. We played tough on the road. We played some competitive games.’ While reporters surrounded his locker, Artest sat in silence and perused the post-game stat sheet. He dragged his finger across Kobe Bryant’s 38-point line and looked at the other numbers on the page before putting it down and looking up. ‘No matter what it says on this stat sheet we did it together,’ Artest said. ‘We did all this together.’”

J.A. Adande, ESPN – “With the NBA Finals hanging in the balance, the Celtics put the basic premise they carried into this series — that if they made Kobe work for his shots, he couldn’t beat them by himself — to the ultimate test, and they prevailed. For those who were waiting to see Bryant break loose, to have the kind of outburst you expect from him (similar to what you expect when menacing dark clouds with sheet-lightning flashes are gathering overhead), you got your answer. He scored 19 points in the third quarter and even had the Celtics players asking their coaches to switch their strategy against him. And after the downpour ceased and the skies cleared, the Celtics had actually increased their halftime lead from six to eight. While Kobe had a galactic quarter, the rest of the Lakers were the exact opposite of our closest star: They came east and sank toward the horizon. So now Phil Jackson is in a quandary. Does he attempt to ask Bryant to carry the Lakers again, when that hasn’t proved to be effective against the Celtics? Or does he ask more from the rest of the team, when they haven’t played consistently? We know now, definitively, the Lakers will need a collective effort. One player might take a game off the Celtics, as Dwyane Wade did in the fourth game of the first round or LeBron James did in the third outing of the conference semis. But the Lakers are behind 3-2 in the series and need to win twice.”

Marc Spears, Yahoo! Sports – “Even the Celtics felt Pierce’s fury. With time running down in the second quarter, Rajon Rondo looked toward Ray Allen on the left wing instead of giving the ball to Pierce for the final shot of the half. Pierce angrily turned the other way and appeared to start walking off the floor as Rondo threw up a wild shot at the buzzer. Rondo darted toward Pierce afterward and the two exchanged words. Pierce later apologized to Rondo in the locker room. ‘It was nothing,’ Pierce said. ‘I told Rajon at halftime I had a couple buckets going and I wanted the ball and he wanted to do something different, and I was a little upset at that. Hey, he’s our point guard and I trust him. He’s made so many great plays for us throughout the year and throughout the playoffs. It was nothing. We’ve got spats with our team all the time. We always have spats. But the good thing about it is we always clean it up.’”

Gary Washburn, Boston Globe – “In the past two Celtics’ victories, each being a must-win, Pierce converted 19 of 33 shots for 46 points after scoring 49 in the first three games. Now, he has put himself in position to do something very few players have the opportunity to accomplish; win an NBA title in his hometown. He has two chances to cement himself as the boogeyman, a bugaboo in Los Angeles each time he steps off the plane at LAX. It will require another special performance, another somewhat selfish night in which he demands the ball and gets visibly furious at his teammates when he doesn’t get the ball in his sweet spot. Sometimes it’s like that. Sometimes Pierce needs to be a jerk when he is hot. He can’t always be a team player and distribute the ball, not when the elbow jumper is falling, not when he takes his burly body and dives into the chests of defenders to create space and drains those 17-footers.”

Chris Sheridan, ESPN – “The Celtics’ collective energy was head and shoulders above the Lakers’ throughout the evening (except for Bryant’s third quarter), and from a tactical standpoint, a precision standpoint, an execution standpoint, Boston was just flat-out better. But the C’s were sloppy at times and knock-kneed toward the end, allowing Los Angeles to stay within reach on a night when the Lakers’ turnover total (14) surpassed their number of assists (12). ‘I thought we had a spirited locker room at the end of our [postgame] session there,’ said Lakers coach Phil Jackson, whose 47-0 record when his team wins Game 1 of a best-of-seven series is in jeopardy. ‘They had a couple things fall into place, and we felt pretty good about our comeback and the way we played at the end of the game. We’re upbeat about going into [Game 6].’ If there is a stretch the Lakers can point to as the one in which this game was lost, it would be the third quarter, when the Celtics scored on 11 of their first 12 possessions to neutralize what Bryant was doing in hitting shots from all angles with varying degrees of difficulty. For more than a week, Rivers had been hammering home the point that a Kobe moment was going to happen and that the Celtics were going to have to withstand it. That they did, but it was an uncomfortable final four minutes until the Garnett-to-Pierce-to-Rondo play gave them some breathing room.”

T.J. Simers, LA Times – “Over the years it doesn’t always mean the Lakers are going to win when Our Ball Hog loses sight of everyone else, but you’ve got to admit it’s the best in basketball entertainment. In addition to scoring, he’s also going to give dirty looks to any teammate who doesn’t get him the ball, which is good for a chuckle if you’re watching. And tell me you didn’t grin or laugh when TV caught him coaching, pointing to himself and insisting he be the one to cover Paul Pierce. Later, I heard he wanted to fly the plane home, too. Our Ball Hog took 27 shots, maybe some of them were forced, but that’s become a part of his game. He scored 38 points, the reason folks watch the NBA to see the game’s best score. I know Phil Jackson likes to emphasize teamwork and all that other nonsense that makes a coach think he has an impact on the game, but I expect we won’t know how he really feels about Our Ball Hog until his next book. For now, he said, ‘he’s the kind of guy you ride a hot hand, that’s for sure.’ And ‘we were waiting for him to do that. ‘But then as he often does, he offered contradictory remarks. He said, ‘You know, other than that, you look at the assists, we had 12; they had 21. That’s a big differential in a game like this.’ And that’s because the ball was in Our Ball Hog’s hands and he wasn’t giving it up.”

Adrian Wojnarowski, Yahoo! Sports – “The big deal is unmistakable: The Lakers need to get tougher, stronger and smarter to beat Boston. Yes, they’ve regressed, Bryant confessed. Milk-carton defense, he called it. For that to happen this deep into the Finals, against this team, it was downright disconcerting to the best player on the planet. He was walking toward the bus Sunday night, on his way out of the Garden and back to L.A. for Game 6, trying to come back on a championship series, on a Celtics franchise that has been the bane of these Lakers for 50 years. All that screaming in the locker room, all that angst over a Game 5 that felt like ’08 again, and Bryant stopped walking and stood for a moment. He had to start building back these Lakers, building back the fragility of a defending champion on the brink of elimination. His eyes narrowed now, his lips stiffened, and Kobe Bryant would say late in this chase for a back-to-back championship, ‘Listen, if you told me at the beginning of the year that we’ve got two games at home to win a championship, yeah, I’ll take that [bleep].’ Two games in Staples Center and two final chances for Bryant’s wrath to deliver these Los Angeles Lakers an epic NBA title. All the cursing, all the screaming, was finally done as Bryant walked calmly, quietly to the purring bus. His words still hung inside the Garden, though. Still loomed over these Lakers. Someone has to make a stand with Kobe Bryant. Someone has to fight to save a championship season.”

Dave McMenamin, ESPN Los Angeles – “Two lapses Sunday sum it all up for L.A. The first came against Rajon Rondo in the final minute. With 38.9 seconds left in the fourth quarter, and after they had cut a 13-point deficit down to just five, the Lakers employed a full-court press. But the didn’t include anyone back as the deep man, protecting against a homerun pass. Paul Pierce leaked out towards half court, Kevin Garnett lobbed the ball to him, Rajon Rondo streaked ahead and Pierce whipped it out to Rondo for a fastbreak layup to extend the lead to seven points. In the second lapse, the Lakers later were able to cut the lead to five again, but this time allowed Rondo (a 61 percent free throw shooter in the playoffs) to work 10.2 seconds off the clock without being fouled, and to get the ball to Ray Allen (who shoots 86 percent from the charity stripe), who ended up taking the foul with 18.4 seconds left and hitting two free throws to put Boston back up by seven. ‘It was a critical time for us to get stops and run as a team and for guys to get into it,’ Lamar Odom, who had two of the Lakers’ nine steals, said. ‘We just couldn’t get none. Tonight was a game where if we’re getting stops, we would be talking about how Kobe got into it and how everybody else kind of followed after that, but we couldn’t get stops. It’s always the defensive end. This is the NBA Finals. You talk about the Super Bowl, the World [Series], in baseball it’s pitching and defense, defense, defense. It’s always the defensive end. We have enough guys that can score and play. It’s always the defense.’”

John Hollinger, ESPN – “Unfortunately for Bryant, his flurry came in a losing effort, thanks in equal parts to the no-show from his teammates and the equally torrid shooting of Pierce. The MVP of the 2008 Finals scored 27 points of his own and topped it with a spectacular falling-out-of-bounds assist to Rajon Rondo for a game-clinching layup with 35 seconds left. Pierce made two layups, but those were his only makes in the paint; like Bryant, the majority of his output came from distance, especially middle distance. Pierce’s other 10 baskets came from outside the paint, and he drew his only free throws on a runner contested by Bryant in the fourth quarter. ‘Paul was terrific,’ Rivers said. ‘He attacked all night. He did it through the offense, he did it through isos, he did it in pick-and-rolls.’ For the night, Pierce was 10-of-17 from outside the paint, including 8-of-13 on long 2s. That’s an unusually high conversion rate for anybody, even a shooter as good as Pierce.”

Mark Heisler, LA Times – “Those icy fingers up and down your spine… Or around your throat. No, it’s not witchcraft, just the Celtics, as usual. With Pau Gasol and Lamar Odom getting ever fainter until they looked like ghosts, and Ron Artest getting ever dizzier until he looked like a purple tornado, the Lakers capped a long bad week with Sunday’s 92-86 loss in Game 5, one of the great face-plants in a history replete with comic opera moments. Before the Celtics invited them back into the game, the Lakers gave it away with a third quarter in which everything they had accomplished this postseason went up in flames. While Kobe Bryant went off as only he and a few others in the game’s history could, scoring 19 of his 38 points in the third quarter, the Lakers let the Celtics score on 12 of the first 13 possessions. Four of the Celtics’ baskets came after missing shots. In other words, the Celtics made it or, when they missed, got it back and put it up again until it went in. Forget getting a rebound, the Lakers may not have touched one for the first eight minutes of the third quarter.”

Mark Murphy, Boston Herald – “‘This team has lost more games in the fourth quarter than any other team,’ Jackson told his charges during a fourth-quarter timeout. ‘They know how to lose.’ Pierce shrugged. ‘Well, he’s right,’ Pierce said of one of his team’s greatest regular-season flaws. ‘That’s been the truth for us throughout the regular season. I haven’t really seen too much of that in the playoffs, but coaches say things to try to motivate their team. I probably would say the same thing if I was a coach in the same situation. It doesn’t bother me at all.’ That’s especially true when said coach is proven wrong.”

Julian Benbow, Boston Globe – “Last night, to get his team to resist the urge to fight off the one-man army that was Bryant, Rivers reminded his team that the key words were ‘one man.’ ‘What we talked about before the game, you could see they wanted to change the defense, they wanted to start trapping, and I just tried to keep telling them, it’s only 2 points each time he scores,’ Rivers said. ‘It’s not 10. It’s just like if someone else was scoring. As long as we were going to keep scoring the way we were scoring, we were going to be good. But it makes you question your defense because he was terrific.’ Pierce was the Celtics’ answer for Bryant, particularly in the third quarter, when he scored 11 points on 5-of-8 shooting. The difference, though, was Pierce had reinforcements. The Celtics shot 56.3 percent from the floor. Bryant went 13 for 27 but while he went on his tear, his teammates seemed to go missing (a combined 18 of 51). Pierce did not see it as a game of one-on-one. ‘As far as Kobe going at it, I wasn’t in no personal duel with him,’ Pierce said. ‘I really didn’t even take the notice that we were going, I guess, back and forth at the time. I’m out there trying to help my ball club to win. Kobe is doing what he does for his ball club. He has to score the ball night in and night out. He makes tough shots, and he’s a proven winner. I wasn’t in the one-on-one deal with Kobe at all.’”

Gary Dzen, Boston Globe – “‘We had a timeout,’ said Celtics coach Rivers. ‘We had one timeout. I didn’t want to use it because we could advance the ball with the time out. So we were going to count to four, and if Kevin didn’t have anybody open, I was going to call it. Before I could get there, I see the ball in the air.’ Garnett threw the pass to Pierce near the same sideline on which he was standing. Pierce jumped in the air like a wide-receiver running an out pattern. He caught the ball under pressure from a Lakers defender, and — unlike a wide receiver — threw another pass to a cutting Rajon Rondo for a layup that would put the Celtics up seven. ‘I was just showing off my Randy Moss and my Tom Brady in one play,’ said Pierce. ‘Going up to catch it, then I went to my Brady mode when I was falling out of bounds to find Rondo for the receiving end.’”

Kevin Ding, Orange County Register – “Maybe the Lakers rally at home to win this NBA championship, maybe not. Either way, there will come a time next spring when they’re sitting in a foreign locker room and their stomachs are churning a bit with the pressure of having to win a pivotal road playoff game. And at that moment, Kobe Bryant can rightly turn to his shaggy-headed Lakers co-star and say: ‘You owe me something, Spaniard. Now show me something.’ That’s because Pau Gasol, for all his sweet skills and how pivotal he has been to the Lakers’ greatness these past three years, has been passive, indecisive and – yes – soft when the pressure is on, the footing is unfamiliar and the faces are even more so. Gasol faltered yet again Sunday night on the road and in the clutch, pushing the Lakers to a 3-2 NBA Finals deficit.”

Monique Walker, Boston Globe – “Back-to-back losses follow the Lakers back to Los Angeles, where the Celtics can clinch tomorrow night at Staples Center. If there were any lingering emotion from the Lakers losing the NBA Finals to the Celtics in 2008, Bryant didn’t want to hear about it. ‘Just man up and play,’ Bryant said. ‘What the hell is the big deal? I don’t see it as a big deal. If I have to say something to them, then we don’t deserve to be champions. We’re down, 3-2, go home, win one game, go into the next one. Simple as that.’”

Steve Bulpett, Boston Herald – “‘Yeah, you can be provocative and get out there and act kind of like they do if you want to and get in people’s faces and do that,’ he said. ‘But that’s not the way I like to coach a team. That’s not what I consider positive coaching, and that’s (not) what I like to think is the right way to do things.’ Jackson later praised Rivers for the way he exploited matchups and got his team ready for the playoffs. But he joked that he was supposed to ‘downplay’ his adversary. He wrapped up by saying, ‘Is that enough for you? I’ll give him a gold star.’ Gamesmanship aside, one might think Rivers would be bothered by the inferences that he coaches his team to act improperly. But if he is, he’s not saying. ‘I just think he’s making a point,’ Rivers said of Jackson. ‘I don’t think he’s making it toward me. And even if he is, I could care less.’”

Paul Flannery, WEEI – “They survived the ‘Kobe game’ that they knew was coming. They fought with each other at times and the Lakers at others. They got great shots and made them, and they gave away possessions carelessly. It was frantic, emotional, sloppy, beautiful and ugly and sometimes all of the above in the same possession. Just like this series. The 2009-10 Celtics won’t be back in the Garden anymore this season, but they left the faithful with optimism and hope that somehow, someway they can pull off this remarkable postseason turnaround. It won’t be easy, and it probably won’t resemble any of the games that have come before it, but the Celtics now have two chances to win one game and an improbable championship.”

Bob Hohler, Boston Globe – “Rondo drew criticism from Rivers only for overreacting to Artest giving Garnett a little extra shove on a foul in the first half, knocking Garnett to the floor. Rondo responded by shoving Artest and drawing a technical foul. Rondo’s view: ‘In Kevin’s defense, I pushed him back.’ His coach’s opinion: ‘I don’t like that stuff. Let’s just play . . . If you want to show toughness, toughness is walking away from all the other stuff.’”

Julian Benbow, Boston Globe – “Kendrick Perkins disagreed. ‘I think Doc kind of got mad at him,’ Perkins said. ‘But I told Doc that was the right play that he made. A hard foul on Kevin, and he retaliated. He’s taking up for his big man. It’s many ways to have an effect on the game. That could have taken Artest out the game, just having Rondo push him from behind. You never know how that could affect him.’ Garnett said it was simply part of the game. ‘At the end of the day it’s basketball,’ Garnett said. ‘We’re not out here boxing. Everybody has played tough when it’s out here with three refs and a crowd full of people. We try to just tell everybody to control their emotions and protect one another, but you know, the way they call the game and the way they hand fines out and flagrants, all that goes out the window to be honest.’”

Kirk Minihane, WEEI – “Artest nearly fell down following the shove, which ABC color analyst Jeff Van Gundy found hard to believe, given the size difference between the two players. ‘Oh, he didn’t even shove him,’ Van Gundy said while watching the replay. ‘Oh, come on. He didn’t push him, he put his hand on him. This is another sell job. This guy [Rondo] weighs 112 pounds, and Artest weighs 280 pounds.’ Rondo was asked if he felt that Artest had ‘flopped’ on the push. ‘I’m not that strong,’ Rondo said. ‘He sold it a little bit. He’s probably the strongest guy on the court in this series. I’ve been lifting a little bit, but other than that I didn’t push him that hard.’”

Monique Walker, Boston Globe – “Meanwhile, Bynum played 32 minutes after getting his troublesome right knee drained for the second time this series. Bynum had 6 points, but just one rebound. ‘More than anything else, Andrew was out of rhythm in the game,’ said coach Phil Jackson. ‘I think he’ll feel much more comfortable getting back and playing. He’s really only played limited minutes since Tuesday night, so we anticipate that he’ll have some opportunity to get himself out there, shoot the ball a little bit, and give us more than just a big body in the sixth game.’”

Have a link I might want to look at? Send it my way by email (jayking@celticstown.com) or Twitter