Allen, Perkins starting

By Gary Dzen

June 17, 2008

1 minute to read

Celtics coach Doc Rivers just confimed what we already deduced from the pregame warmups: Ray Allen and Kendrick Perkins will start tonight’s game.

“Ray is doing good,” said Rivers. “Obviously he’s not had a lot of sleep over the last three days, probably — I don’t know. We were thinking about it before this morning, just how much he’s probably had. It can’t be much. But he’s ready. You can see it, he’s ready to play.”

Perkins warmed up before the game, got some treatment on the trainer’s table, and came out into the locker room minutes ago and told reporters he was ready to play.

“I’m feeling a whole lot better since Thursday,” said Perkins. “We’ll see how it goes during the game. Hopefully, I can make it through the game without reinjuring it.”

Rivers also talked about the Celtics’ little ordeal in leaving Los Angeles:

“[Monday] was a long day, it really was,” said Rivers. “I thought the funniest part of it is we get a call, we were supposed to leave at 11:00 and they called us at 9:00 and told us we had to run to the bus because the first plane had broken down, so we were going to get on the other one that was leaving, so we had to unfortunately pull people off that one. And when we get there at the gate, we see the Laker plane taking off, and I was saying, oh, this is nice (laughter).

“We actually got all the way out to the runway. We jumped on, things were smooth, we get to the runway, and then the pilot comes on and said we’re going to have a little delay, and he said it’s either going to be 10 minutes or 2-3 hours, and it was more. The only bad part about it was that we couldn’t get off the plane for the most part. I bet we sat out there for, I don’t know, three, four hours, maybe longer, before we took off.”