Celtics Doc Rivers going with the "pain of losing as motivation" route

Losing sucks. Getting close to the ultimate goal and losing really, really sucks.

It’s why the Orlando Magic had a photo of the Lakers celebrating in Orlando at the entrance to their weight room, as a reminder. And as a result… okay, not a great example of results. But you get the idea.

Doc Rivers is doing the same thing with Boston in a sense — he wants his guys to remember how losing game seven felt, as he told Marc Spears of Yahoo!

“That won’t go away. I had dinner with [Rajon] Rondo and ‘Baby’ [Glen Davis(notes)] in Vegas and they were talking about how much it hurts. I said, ‘I hope it hurts you for the rest of your life. It should.’ ”

He hopes to have better success with this tactic than Stan Van Gundy did.