How long until Doc starts taking some blame?

[Finkelskyhook]

Simple answer to the thread question.  Never.

Remember pre-Garnett/Allen?  Even when the core of the team had 3 years under Rivers and they were losing (in those rare games that Rivers was trying to win in that 3rd year)...The team was young.  They don't play defense.  (May have had something to do with the fact that they had no defensive system).  Blah blah blah.

But it was never Rivers' fault.  

It still isn't.

To Rivers' credit, he defers much of the credit when things are going well.

Hrm... were you actually even a Celtics fan then?  Rivers was on the hot seat and speculation was he was about to be fired.  I'm sure he would have been had the KG trade not happened, or if he failed to win that first year.

I've probably been a Celtics fan longer than you've been alive.

The thread question was "How long until Doc starts taking some blame?".  The reality is Rivers never did.  Ever.  Defensively, every player was out of position all the time.  That's coaching. Rivers blamed the youth...In spite of the obvious that poor positioning was the nature of the useless scrambling defensive sets Rivers and Brown was implementing at the time.  He openly browbeat young players on the court while not doing the same to vets.  His press conferences blamed youth....Even though the youth weren't that young and had been coached by him 3 years.  Blamed a lack of defense.  But at no time did he call out himself to coach better.  The speculation of Rivers' demise was only in blogs and through the press.  Ainge was always firmly in Rivers' corner. 

I'll say now what I said then.  If the players had been coached better.. Particularly defensively..Had we played to win the last half of the season pre-Garnett instead of overtly tanking... We wouldn't have had to literally gut the roster and draft choices to get 2 stars plus a second round draft choice.

[kozlodoev]

I don't know how long we'll keep coming up with phantom explanations of the slump. The bottom line is, our core needs to play better. It's as simple as that.

The whole season, we closed games with an identical lineup -- Rondo, Allen, Pierce, Garnett, Davis. Looking at the last 5 games, entering the 4th quarter we were in a position to win any single one of them.

The result? The team averaged a shade above 18 points in said fourth quarters, and sports a 1-4 record.

This is not about the Perkins' defense (or anyone's defense for that matter), integrating new guys, or the war in Iraq. It's just plain old poor offensive play from our closers.