Cassell back to help Celtics defend NBA title

BOSTON (AP) — Of all the issues Doc Rivers had to deal with in his first summer as an NBA champion — replacing the free agents who left, working on his golf game, figuring out what to wear to the White House — there's one thing that never came up.

"I can't imagine even seeing a laid-back Kevin Garnett," Rivers said Monday. "I don't think that will happen. So I don't worry about that part."

The Boston Celtics coach gathered with his title-winning team for media day at its practice facility, where a shiny white 2008 championship banner is already covering the empty spot where Rivers pointed a spotlight last year — just in case anyone didn't get the point. It was the NBA-record 17th title for the team, the first since 1986, and no one in the organization wants to go through a similar drought before Banner No. 18.

"You do not get to a level and then step backward," Garnett said. "It will probably be the hardest thing we've done, other than getting the first championship."

The Celtics won last season after one of the most dramatic offseason overhauls in NBA history, bringing in Garnett and Ray Allen to join with Paul Pierce in a new Big Three that managed, in its first year together, to add to the title cache amassed by previous Boston legends like Larry Bird, Robert Parish and Kevin McHale.

But the original Big Three didn't stop at one — they won in 1981, '84 and '86. And, after showing last season what a little championship hunger can do, the new threesome wants more, too.

"You look around at all the banners, all the great teams, all the great players that have been here, they did it more than once," Pierce said. "That's what it's going to take to get to that next level with the other Celtics greats."

The team begins that effort on Tuesday when they begin training camp in earnest at Salve Regina University in Newport, R.I. It's not exactly Rome, where the Celtics trained last year as part of an effort to bring all of the new players together, but the mission is different this time, too.

"The bonding is there," Rivers said. "When you do something we've done, and we went on that long journey. That can't go away. I don't think we need to go to Europe again."

Rivers said the team had to deal with the pressure of being the favorite all last season, when it won its first eight games, opened 20-2 and cruised to the best record in the NBA.

"We were on every magazine cover you could be on without actually doing something," he said. "At least this year we've earned that right."

They'll collect the rest of their spoils before the season opener on Oct. 28 against Cleveland and LeBron James, whom Boston dispatched in the Eastern Conference semifinals in an epic seven-game series. Past Celtics greats, and NBA commissioner David Stern, are scheduled to be in attendance when another banner is raised above the Boston Garden court and the players will get their championship rings.

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