Series is really heating up

Auburn Hills was a pressure cooker

WALTHAM - With everything on the stat sheets just about even, the Eastern Conference finals have come down to Jedi mind tricks.

Sam Cassell had the sweaty bald head to prove it.

He was one of a few players to notice that the visitors' locker room in The Palace of Auburn Hills felt like a sauna before Game 4 Monday. The temperature didn't drop much after the Celtics lost, either, which got Cassell to start pointing fingers, particularly at Pistons president Joe Dumars, a Bad Boys-era Piston.

"I told Joe after the game, 'You can put the air conditioning back on now,' " Cassell said.

Coincidence? Maybe.

Conspiracy theory? Definitely.

"It wasn't hot like that in Game 3," Cassell said. "It was hot in Game 4."

Celtics coach Doc Rivers was thinking the same way. But seeing that he and Pistons coach Flip Saunders go back a little bit, to their time coaching Team USA during the 2001 Goodwill Games, Rivers laughed it off.

"I thought it was funny," said Rivers. "I saw Flip after the game and he was talking about how hot their locker room was. I was like, 'Yeah, right.' "

Rivers wasn't the only one to notice, but most of his players actually welcomed the heat.

"It was definitely more hot in the locker room," said Rajon Rondo. "But it made me more loose. It wasn't a problem. But it was definitely extremely hot."

Kendrick Perkins concurred.

"It was hot," he said. "I like that, though."

One Celtics staffer who tried to turn the heat down in the locker room said it was 95 degrees. A reporter spotted the thermostat on the wall at 76 degrees, which is practically tropical by New England standards.

Which got Cassell thinking about payback.

After all, this is the stuff of Celtics lore, the stories of how Red Auerbach would make sure the only water in the visitors' locker room was cold water, the heat was perpetually broken, and the pipes to the water fountain and the sewer system were one and the same.

Cassell was thinking along those lines. Maybe a little tamer.

"We should have it freezing in the Garden," he said, plotting for tonight's game.

The only problem, he pointed out, was that "it's always freezing in the Garden."

Learning curve

It took Steve Nash two straight first-round exits and three playoff appearances altogether to reach the number of postseason games Rondo has played this season.

Jason Kidd didn't see the postseason until he was two years deep in the NBA, and even then, it took him four trips to get the experience Rondo has picked up in his first.

The only point guard with as much playoff experience as Rondo at such a young age is Tony Parker, a player Rondo has been compared with more than once. And with the point guard position emerging as an even more crucial matchup with the emergence of Detroit's Rodney Stuckey, Rondo says the experience has done wonders for his basketball IQ.

"I'm learning a lot," he said. "The biggest thing for me is trying to be consistent. That's the hardest part of the postseason, because you're playing a team over and over again and they know your tendencies and they take away a lot of your game, of your strengths. So you try to stay consistent if offensively you're not going, try to get your teammates involved with your intangibles."

Rondo said you could pick out any matchup in this series and call it key, but Stuckey, Chauncey Billups, and Lindsey Hunter have a 23.2-13.5 advantage in scoring over Rondo, Cassell, and Eddie House through four games, and the Pistons' trio is up, 39-23, in the assists column, with Rondo giving the Celtics all their helpers from the point.

"We didn't play bad," Cassell said about Game 4. "Rondo has to continue to be aggressive, and he will. I don't worry about Rajon. Rajon will be fine. He'll figure it out. He'll make some baskets. He'll get assists. He's the spoon that stirs the coffee. He makes us go."

His game perks up

Notice how when Perkins picked up his sixth foul with about 3 1/2 minutes left in Monday's game, Rivers had to use almost all of the 30 seconds he's allotted to get Perkins to leave the floor? Perkins had a good thing going in Auburn Hills: 12 points and 10 rebounds in Game 3, 10 and 6 in Game 4. "He was great in Game 3, he was great in Game 4," Rivers said. "But the most important part of it is that his energy has been great. When you're a role player, you have to be a great energy player. That's Perk. The last two games, Perk has probably been as good as he's been all playoffs, and he has to keep doing that. He has to really do it tomorrow."

Newest Hoosier

Not long ago, Rivers said he was staying out of his son's decision to transfer from Georgetown. Now that 6-foot-4-inch point guard Jeremiah Rivers has settled on Indiana, passing up Georgia Tech and Central Florida, his dad said he's happy for him. "I think it's great," Rivers said. "I don't think he could have gone wrong, honestly, in any of the places. If he would have stayed at Georgetown, I was extremely happy. He narrowed it down to Georgia Tech, which I would have loved, and UCF, which I would have loved, and Indiana. He couldn't have gone wrong. He made the choice and I'm happy for him. I love [Indiana coach] Tom Crean. It's great. It's a good fit."

Christopher L. Gasper and Marc J. Spears of the Globe staff contributed to this report; Julian Benbow can be reached at jbenbow@globe.com