Thirst for first quenched
Playoff series victory a breakthrough for Rivers
One of the more memorable phone calls Doc Rivers received Sunday night came from his counterpart in Detroit, Flip Saunders. The two are close - Rivers assisted Saunders on the US Goodwill Games team in 2001 - and the Celtics coach had an idea what the call was all about.
"Now, the monkey is off your back," Saunders told Rivers. A few laughs ensued.
"Yeah," Rivers said, "but we're still not finished. We want one thing. The same thing you want." More laughs.
Rivers understood from whence Flip came. He now is no longer The Coach That Can't Win A Playoff Series. Until the Celtics mauled the Hawks Sunday, Rivers had coached four teams into the playoffs, and all had been first-round casualties.
After losing Game 6 in Atlanta, he briefly held the record for most games coached in the playoffs without winning a series. Now that mark belongs to Kevin Loughery who, according to the Elias Sports Bureau, has coached 27 playoff games and never won a series.
Saunders, for the longest time, was the epitome of the coach who couldn't get it done in the postseason. Never mind that the reason he couldn't, or didn't, had as much to do, or more, with his team than his coaching.
For seven straight years, from 1997 through 2003, Saunders got the Minnesota Timberwolves into the playoffs. And in each of those years, he got them no farther. He coached 29 games in the playoffs over those seven seasons and won only seven. Kevin Garnett was there for each and every one of them.
Cleveland coach Mike Brown, meanwhile, won his very first playoff series. But, unlike Rivers and Saunders, he had had several years as an NBA assistant, in Indiana and San Antonio, where his teams generally fared well in the postseason. He has a ring from his 2002-03 season with San Antonio.
"For me, it's tough to imagine not getting out of the first round," Brown said. "But it's probably going to happen someday."
Rivers never served a minute as an NBA assistant, although he said Gregg Popovich wanted him on the Spurs bench right after he stopped playing. Saunders was the Wolves' general manager when he replaced Bill Blair 20 games into the 1995-96 season.
He did some time as a college assistant at Tulsa and his alma mater, the University of Minnesota.
During Saunders's Biblical drought with the Timberwolves, Rivers used his bully pulpit as a network television analyst to defend his friend and colleague.
"Flip was in that same boat, and it's no fun," Rivers said. "When I was doing television, people were killing Flip and I defended him so hard. I said, 'People, they shouldn't advance. They're not good enough. They're the underdog.'
"And, finally, when Flip did have the players [2004], they got to the conference finals. And I believe to this day that if Sam [Cassell] didn't get hurt, they'd have made it to the Finals and might have won the whole thing."
Rivers knows he, too, was getting killed for not getting any of his teams past the first round.
And there's no telling what might have happened had the Celtics lost Sunday. (Team broadcaster Sean Grande speculated on the air that he thought it highly unlikely Rivers would have been brought back.)
Rivers's mother, Bettye, made her first appearance of the season for Game 7 against Atlanta; she usually attends a dozen or so Celtics games, but this year was harder for her, following the death of her husband last November.
But Rivers said yesterday his mother's visit had been planned for a while ("she didn't think we'd be playing that day, either," he laughed), and that he felt no huge sense of relief after finally moving on following the dispatching of the Hawks.
"It really wasn't all that of a relief," he said. "I'm very realistic with the teams I've had. We managed to get up, 3-1, on Detroit [in the first year the NBA went to seven games in the first round] with a lineup of Pat Garrity, Andrew DeClercq, Drew Gooden, Tracy McGrady, and Darrell Armstrong. But guys still kill you, and I don't think they do their research.
"In my mind, prior to this season, I've had one opportunity, and that was my first year here, when we played Indiana. A lot of people still picked Indiana to win the series, even though we had the home court, because their guys had been injured and were coming back. But I still thought we should have won that series.
"Other than that, every team I've had has been the underdog and has not had the home-court advantage. We pushed hard. We just couldn't break through."
And this year?
"I thought, we should win," Rivers said. "And we did. It was tougher than expected, but we did."
Peter May can be reached at pmay@globe.com
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