Stories from Celtics’ past wins over LeBron James and Kobe Bryant are helping fuel this year’s team (Exclusive)

When Sam Cassell joined the Boston Celtics midway through the 2007-08 season, then-Celtics head coach Doc Rivers told him why the team chose him.

“Dr. Rivers told me he brought me here to win a playoff game,” Cassel told The Courier-Journal. “I was like ‘A playoff game? I can play more than one playoff game. But he said, ‘I need you to win one playoff game for me.'”

Cassell, 38 at the time, came off the bench as a veteran and ultimately helped lead the team to a victory over Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers. Now, he’s a first-year assistant coach with the Celtics, seeking his first championship since then. Cassell, with that experience, will be tasked with helping Boston’s current core achieve the same goal, but in a much different NBA than the one he was playing in when Rivers told him to win a playoff game.

The game ended up being Game 1 of the 2008 Eastern Conference Semifinals between Boston and the Cleveland Cavaliers. Against the 23-year-old LeBron James, Cassell came off the bench and played almost the entire fourth quarter. He scored 10 points against the Celtics in this quarter, while James only scored 2 points on 1 of 8 shots. Boston won 76-72 to take the series to seven games.

“A purebred,” Cassell said of James, who now plays for the Los Angeles Lakers, on the court that night. “He’s very fast.”

If the Celtics and Lakers write a new chapter in their famous rivalry in this year’s NBA Finals, how will Boston need to change its strategy for the games Cassell plays?

“Times are different now, man. That game was a completely different basketball game, definitely a tough, slap-in-the-face basketball game,” Cassell said. “He’s a little older now but still playing at a high level.”

The Celtics’ current core, led by Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, is five years removed from back-to-back losses to James in the Eastern Conference Finals during his second stint in Cleveland. When Boston reaches the Finals in 2022, it won’t be able to contain Stephen Curry and the dynastic Golden State Warriors.

After losing in the finals, former Celtics head coach Imee Udoka never coached a game for the Celtics again. Following an investigation into allegations of an inappropriate relationship with a team employee, he was suspended and later fired, with Joe Mazzula taking over as head coach.

This year, Tatum and his teammates are off to another fast start, going 14-4 and ranking first in the early race for the Eastern Conference. According to The Courier’s NBA season predictions, Boston has the best chance of winning the NBA Finals. Tatum, who finished fourth in voting last year, is back in the MVP conversation as the team faces the Indiana Pacers in the quarterfinals of the in-season tournament on Monday.

“These guys are more skilled than we are,” Cassel said of this year’s team versus his championship team. “The team was built differently. We were built on selflessness, we were built on manpower, and it was more of a power play at the time.

“If we were playing with that team in today’s day and age, there’s no way we could beat those guys right now.”

Still, there was a noticeable change in Cassell’s thinking about Boston’s players once he joined the coaching staff.

“I just wish they would collaborate more,” said Cassel, who is partnering with Zenni Optical to launch his own eyewear line, Coach’s Collection. “We had a saying in Boston when I played there, one team that said… ‘I can’t be everything I can be unless you can be everything you can be.'”

Cassell said Boston won the championship in 2008 because of a culture of selflessness. It’s a similar theme he’s instilled in his team this year.

He pointed to the example of Kevin Garnett, whom he worked with with the Minnesota Timberwolves, a player who agreed to take fewer shots after coming to Boston and ended up scoring fewer points.

“When you walk into the locker room, check your ego at the door, that’s what that team did and that’s the main reason we won the championship in 2008,” Cassel said. “He scored 25 points and 13 rebounds a night. When he came to Boston, his scoring dropped to only 18 points and 10 rebounds. That’s the sacrifice.”

But Cassell also knows that winning a championship requires more than just humility from at least one player. It usually takes one player to step up and lead the team in the big moments.

Cassell later recalled watching James and Paul Pierce play in Game 7 of the 2008 Celtics-Cavaliers playoff series, where he helped the team win in Game 1. Cassell did not play in Game 7, but he watched from the sidelines as one of Pierce’s players nearly tied James’ 45 points with 41 points in Boston’s 97-92 win. He saw what it took to go against James in one of the best moments of his early career.

“LeBron, with all his greatness, he doesn’t want those guys to lose,” Cassell said. “It’s a battle of wills and the other thing is, these two guys protect each other… that’s what makes it so special. “This is the biggest fight I’ve ever seen. “

Cassell said he shared the story with Celtics players as motivation — and it wasn’t the last time he shared it with them since 2008, when Bryant’s Lakers were in the Finals Waiting for them. Cassell said entering this series he, Garnett, Ray Allen, Pierce and Rajon Rondo had no doubt they would beat Bryant, despite his reputation.

“At that point, no matter what happened, I didn’t care who was on Kobe’s team, there were probably two Kobe Bryants out there, and they didn’t beat us!” Cassel said.

The Celtics defeated the Lakers in six games. After Cassell retired in 2009, Boston faced Los Angeles in a rematch of the 2010 Finals, but lost to Bryant in seven games. Now, after another loss in the Finals and five straight playoff series losses to James, Cassell knows it will take more than stories from the past to overcome past victories this year. They need to deal with a whole new generation of elite competition and play by a whole new set of rules.

“It’s their story, we’ve got our story, it’s their story, they’ve got their story,” Cassell said. “So I don’t need to talk about what we did, it’s their story.”