RF. III 🦁

Kevin Garnett says after a loss to the Lakers early in the season Doc Rivers once demanded $100 from every player, coach, and staff member on the Boston Celtics, and says Rivers then climbed onto a chair and hid the money above the ceiling tiles in the Lakers’ visiting locker room, and told his team they would only get their money back if they got back there for the NBA finals “It was ’09–’10. We went into ’08, we go home, Conference Finals. ’09, the Lakers win it, and then we match up with the Lakers in ’10. But when we started off the year, we didn’t start off with the greatest start. We play the Lakers in L.A., and Doc comes in and says, ‘I want everybody to give me a hundred dollars.’” “Why? I’m looking around at people like, ‘Goddamn it.’ I pull out a hundred dollars. Everybody’s pulling out money. Johnny Joe, who’s the equipment manager, goes around, and he’s grabbing all of it.” “As he’s grabbing it, you see that it’s starting to accumulate. It’s like maybe 30 people in this room, with coaches and players. You got 15 players, then you got seven, eight coaches, then you got your video guys, everybody around, trainers. So all together, it’s like 30 people, and he gets a hundred dollars from every person in here.” “Long story short, he gets it, and we see it. So he takes a chair, takes the ceiling and removes the ceiling. I’m like, we’re all looking at this before a game, by the way, too. ‘Doc, what are you doing?’” “He puts the money up there, and then he puts the ceiling back. Comes down, gets out of the chair, and says, ‘We’re coming back to get that money.’ He says, ‘We’re coming back to get that money.’ I said, ‘Hold on.’ Like, we’re in L.A., right? We’re in the Staples Center. I’m like, ‘What?’ So I was thinking, ‘Man, I need to start pushing this ceiling back and seeing what’s up here. He’s putting money up here thinking that it’s going to be here.’” “So I was up on him, like, ‘Man, stop tripping.’ And he was like, ‘If you don’t believe, get out. Because we’re coming back here. We’re going to be back here, and we’re going to beat this team for the championship. We’re going to get our second ring in here.’”