Pierce's wait is finally over

Veteran thrilled team stuck by him

AUBURN HILLS, Mich. - When it was all over, and the Celtics had earned their first trip to the NBA Finals since 1987, Paul Pierce made his way to the Celtics' bench and extended his hand to Doc Rivers.

But Rivers wasn't having any of that.

The Celtics coach reached out with his hand and cupped Pierce's head. He wanted to cup Pierce's heart, too, but that would have required more than one pair of hands, given its enormity in these three tough playoff rounds, culminating with last night's 89-81 victory over the Pistons in Game 6 of the Eastern Conference finals.

Who could forget the way he took over with 22 points in a Game 7 triumph the top-seeded Celtics needed to have against the eighth-seeded Atlanta Hawks? Or the tour de force 41-point performance he submitted in a shootout against LeBron James (45 points) in Game 7 against the Cavaliers?

Facing a 10-point deficit with 10:29 left in Game 6 last night, Pierce delivered once again, taking over the game and scoring 12 of his team-high 27 points in the last 7:35.

"I just wanted to try and impose my will," Pierce said. "Just being in that position six years ago [in the Eastern Conference finals against the New Jersey Nets] and letting it slip away, I didn't want it to slip away again."

And so, in a poignant moment that played out in front of the scorer's table at The Palace of Auburn Hills, Rivers threw his arms around Pierce and shared a hearty hug. The men giddily bounced, thrilled not so much by the fact this victory had propelled the Celtics to the Finals, but by how far their relationship as player and coach had come.

"I just pretty much said to Doc, 'Thanks for sticking with me,' " Pierce said. "We definitely had our ups and downs as a player and coach in the beginning, but he could have easily went to management and said, 'Aw, I don't want this knucklehead,' but he didn't. He stuck it out with me."

But Rivers didn't necessarily see it that way.

"He said he loved me," Rivers said. "And then he said, 'Thank you for sticking with me,' and I was thinking, 'Me with you?' I was thinking the other way around. It meant a lot, obviously, but we're going to enjoy this."

Pierce whooped it up with his teammates, donning a black Eastern Conference champions cap and mugging it up in the Celtics' locker room, where he was congratulated by none other than John Havlicek, who helped the Celtics hang at least half of their 16 NBA championship banners and presented the team with the gleaming silver basketball as conference champs.

Pierce, a native of Inglewood, Calif., even started chants of "Beat LA! Beat LA!"

"As a kid, I hated the Celtics," Pierce said with a laugh. "I'm going back home to play my team that I grew up watching. It's a dream come true, man, just thinking about it. I think that [Boston-LA] rivalry revolutionized the game of basketball and now I'm part of it."

Pierce made certain of that by keeping his composure when he needed to most - at the end of the third quarter.

That's when referee Bennett Salvatore waved off a contested 3-pointer Pierce had hoisted over Richard Hamilton, inducing him to leave his feet with a ball fake. Pierce, however, was charged with an offensive foul for creating the contact with Hamilton.

In another time, Pierce said he might have imploded. But he exploded.

"I was a little upset at the call, but, hey, I knew that things wouldn't go our way being that we were on the road and trying to go to the NBA Finals," Pierce said. "I didn't expect calls tonight. My whole mind-set going in there was if they made a bad call on me, I was just going to suck it up and try to get it back. So just going into the game mentally, after watching the Spurs-Lakers game, it seemed like, hey, they let them play for the most part, and that's just fine with me.

"That was my mind-set going into the game," he added. "I didn't let it frustrate me, like probably in the past. I probably would have lost my cool, lost my poise, got a technical. But that would have been selfish of me and taken away from the team. So I just wanted to brush it off and just keep playing."

He went to the line for a pair of foul shots that would have given the Celtics a 1-point lead, but after missing the first, he made the second to tie it, 70-70, after craftily inducing Jason Maxiell to commit a foul that put the Pistons over the limit.

He contorted his body on a lane spin job that induced Rodney Stuckey to commit his first personal and tacked on the foul shot to give the Celtics a 73-72 lead. On the Celtics' next possession, Pierce nailed a clutch jumper from the corner for a 77-74 lead and followed with a pair of foul shots that made it 79-77 and capped a 7-point tear.

"Paul's been through so much, on and off the floor," Rivers said. "I think we were talking about this, the fact that he stayed in the times when all the stars, when their teams get bad, they want to bail, they want to get traded, but Paul reupped. He stayed with us.

"To me that means a lot, and I said that when he did it," Rivers added. "So he deserves this."

That and a hug from the coach.