Still finding their legs

So, after three games, are the men in green keeping their word? Well, yes -- and no. There certainly have been bursts of transition basketball (see the third-quarter turnaround against New Orleans). But if the Celtics are truly going to become a fast-break team, then they need to embrace the style completely, not just from night to night, but from minute to minute. The mind-set has to become second nature. While some of the groundwork for that has been laid, that "second nature" component hasn't sunk in yet.

"We should be further along with the running game than we are right now," O'Brien acknowledged yesterday, shortly before his team departed for Detroit for a game against the Pistons tonight. "Guys are still adjusting to our depth, and the idea there's no need to save anything for the rest of the game. We want them to go until their tongues are hanging out, maybe with the exception of Paul [Pierce], who will play a lot of minutes.

"We need to do a better job of running for the sake of running, to wear down opponents who don't have as much depth as we have."

Is it as simple as making running a habit?

"I don't know how long it takes to create habits," O'Brien answered. "We run and run and run and run and run in practice."

Ask Ainge, the architect of this new style, and he insists he's fine with the early results.

"I think some people have misconstrued the idea of us as a running team," said Ainge. "We're not trying to be the Denver Nuggets of the mid '80s."

What the Celtics are trying to accomplish is to run off key situations, such as a long defensive rebound or a steal.

"We've gotten more easy baskets in the first three games than in the [final] 20-game stretch of last season," Ainge said. "Jim O'Brien has established the Celtics as one of the top defensive teams in basketball.

"If we can take advantage of our defense by getting four to five easy baskets a game, that's a lot."

O'Brien, who spends as much time as anyone in the NBA poring over statistical trends (making him the ideal candidate to replace Grady Little), confirmed that Boston is cashing in on the long rebounds and the key steals.

"We're doing very, very well there," said O'Brien. "We're scoring off about 85 percent of those chances."

And how do those numbers compare with last season?

"I don't know," he retorted. "I could care less about what we did last year. It wasn't something we were concentrating on."

With an overhauled roster and a new starting lineup, Boston is embarking on this new venture from scratch. Yet when the Celtics traded Antoine Walker and received Raef LaFrentz as the key player in return, it didn't exactly conjure up images of fast-break basketball. LaFrentz is hardly known for his blazing end-to-end speed.

"I've been on teams where we've said, `Let's push it,' " said LaFrentz. "But then you start running up and down, and it gets to be a grind, and you stop.

"That's what happened in Denver. We were going to try and use the oxygen thing to our advantage, but we weren't deep enough. This team could be. Outside of Paul, everyone has someone who can step in. We've got a good big man rotation."

But can he honestly say the fast-break game plays to his strengths?

"Not on the wing," LaFrentz conceded, "but my strength could be as a trailer. If they look for me there, I'd have the most open three in the book."

Celtics veteran Walter McCarty said the running game has required mental adjustments for last year's holdovers, as well as the newcomers.

"It was tougher in preseason," he said. "Teams would score, and we'd have a tendency to take it out a little too slowly. But it's all we concern ourselves with in practice. We run, play defense, run off the defense. Every minute, we're pushing the ball, pushing the ball."

"It's all about body language," added point guard Mike James. "If they see me running, then they're going to run. If I'm pushing it, they're gonna push with me. The key is to have control while you are keeping that pace."

The most curious part about Boston's plan to push the ball is the obvious lack of depth and experience at the point. Rookie Marcus Banks is clearly not ready to handle the responsibilities of running an NBA team just yet, and Jiri Welsch, if you believe his former coach, Don Nelson, is at least two to three years away from possessing the poise required to play the position. James looks a lot more like one of those tweeners than a pure playmaker.

"The Nuggets ran with Fat Lever at the point, and he wasn't really a point guard," countered Ainge. "Sure, if you had Magic [Johnson], or Jason Kidd, or John Stockton, it would be a no-brainer. With their knowledge, and their passing skills, you'd run all day. But that's like asking for [Dan] Marino, [John] Elway, or Joe Montana.

"Guys like that just don't come around that often. We're trying to run on every opportunity, but if someone takes something away right now, we're not so good that we can turn to Option B, C, and D and have it work for us."

The Celtics have played only three games, and hope to have Options B and C ironed out by the New Year. In the meantime, there's simply not enough data to draw a chart in black ink.

"That's right," Ainge said. "It's definitely a work in progress. But we're happy where we're headed. Even the great Laker teams, one of the best running teams of all time, had games where they scored in the 80s."

The key is to run with the same purpose in April as in November. Many, many teams have tried to fulfill that goal, and failed.

"We're going to try," Pierce promised. "We've got the athletes. We're emphasizing it all the time. We'll see."

We'll be watching.

Jackie MacMullan is a Globe columnist. Her e-mail address is macmullan@globe.com.