Doc Rivers has played/coached with and against some of the best NBA talent in the world. He played with Dominique Wilkins and against Dominique Wilkins. He's coached Kawhi Leonard and Joel Embiid, among other stars, in the past two seasons. And in one series, the 2008 NBA Finals, he watched play from Hall of Fame talents Kevin Garnett, Ray Allen, Paul Pierce, Kobe Bryant and Pau Gasol.
But one of the most memorable moments from that series for Rivers didn't come from one of the legendary players involved. It came, instead, from a legend of another industry: famous movie star Jack Nicholson.
It was Game 4 of the Finals at the STAPLES Center, and, as was so often the case, Lakers superfan Nicholson sat courtside and cheered on the purple and gold. There was a ton to cheer about, too, considering Los Angeles jumped out to a 24-point lead midway through the second quarter of play. At the half, the Celtics had cut the lead from 24 to 18, though the differential hovered around that number until Rivers called another timeout, down 20, with around 7:00 to go in the third quarter. And that was the timeout that changed things.
"That was the best moment, maybe, in my coaching career as far as just feeling, because I really believed," Rivers recalled on the "All The Smoke" podcast (1:23:54 mark). "I kept telling [Tom Thibodeau], we're going to win this game... I gotta find the right combination... something's not fitting here, something's not working here...
"...I just couldn't figure it out and then we fell on the Eddie House-Paul Pierce, we moved Paul to the four and took off that game."
With five minutes left in the third, the Lakers' lead was 13. With two minutes left, it was 10. A three-point jumper with just over a minute left in the quarter cut it to six. And even though they were still trailing, Rivers knew that the game was firmly in his team's hands.
"And the best part, moment for me was Jack Nicholson sitting next to me when we came back..." Rivers said. "When it got to six, the game was over. You could feel it and the only thing that I remember about that game that was funny is Jack Nicholson kept yelling, "Doc, Doc!" Just kept calling my name.
"And I finally turned around and he said, 'we are dead men walking.' "
And Nicholson, a lifetime Lakers diehard with a good eye for basketball, was right on. Two minutes into the fourth, the game was tied. And though it stayed close the whole game, the Celtics never lost the lead that they claimed with four minutes to go, winning Game 4 by a score of 97-91.
Rivers is just lucky that he was dealing with Jack Nicholson, the Los Angeles iteration. If Nicholson had been at one of the games played at TD Garden that series, it might have been the Boston mob boss iteration, Frank Costello — one of my favorite movie characters of all time.
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