...not mourning...

I am choosing not to mourn this Celtics loss. I am choosing to think it was awesome, instead. I am not a Laker hater, I hold ill-will towards very few things associated with the Lakers, and I am going to continue to love the Boston Celtics until my very last breath on this earth.

I am going to look forward, look ahead, and embrace the NBA Off-season, which is always awesome, and this year is going to be super-awesome, super-incredible and entirely exciting.

The Celtics may be given a huge relief this year in the form of Rasheed retiring. This is news to me, but Doc and KG had interesting words post-game last night.

Rivers heaped praise on Wallace for his efforts and noted it might have been his final NBA game, lending credence to the suggestion that Wallace simply wanted to offer goodbyes to veteran officials Danny Crawford and Joey Crawford.

"He was a warrior," Rivers said. "I don't know if Rasheed will ever play again. You know, he's one of them. I think he took that out on the floor with him. I think he is thinking about retiring, and I thought you could see that in his play. He was dying out there. When he got the cramps and the strains, he was just trying to figure out a way of staying on the floor.

"We had to keep subbing him for one minute and two minutes, and I thought the reason we got up early was because of Rasheed Wallace. We got it low in the post, he started scoring, and I thought what happened was late in the game he got tired and had the injuries and we couldn't go down anymore, and I think that had a huge impact on how we were playing. We had to go away from the post almost because of fatigue. It's the first time all year that you can actually say, at the end of the day, we were old at the end of the game because we didn't have a enough bodies. I thought it hurt us."

Wallace signed a three-year, $19 million contract last offseason. He stands to make $6.3 million if he returns next season and $6.8 million in 2011-12.

Asked about Wallace's future, Kevin Garnett didn't sound optimistic about his return.

"Not a good one ... I see a lot of myself in him and we have a lot of the same ties and a lot of the same characteristics. Both the class of '95 ... so for him to come in and give his thanks and his regards after a loss like this ... it was a difficult night."

The Celtics lose the contract of Scals, and may lose the contract of Sheed, and that opens up a whole heck of a lot of money to go out and build the proper team around Rondo, KG, Perk and Pierce.

I am excited, I am encouraged, I am still feeling really proud, and I'm not mourning.