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All those doubters who wondered aloud if Pierce could share the ball, the minutes, and the limelight have been quieted. The critics who dogged his defense have had to eat some crow.

"Paul's not perfect," said Celtics boss Danny Ainge, "but the one thing I've always appreciated about him was he loves to play the game of basketball. He comes to play every night. Now, some nights he might have gotten frustrated, and he didn't always do the right thing, but I think people forget he had a great deal of responsibility and expectations placed on him, and sometimes that wasn't fair."

On draft night in 2005, the Celtics prepared two advertisements to appear in the Boston Globe the following morning: one prominently featuring Pierce, and the other with Pierce conspicuously absent. The team haggled with the Portland Trail Blazers in the days leading up to the draft over a deal that would have shipped Pierce west and landed Boston the No. 3 pick and some contracts to make it work cap-wise.

"We were pretty close," Ainge said.

"There was always that side of Paul," Ainge said. "He worked extremely hard, he just didn't do it every day."

Now, Ainge reports, on the offdays after back-to-back games, he can see Pierce from his office window doing sprints on the treadmill. In a recent conversation I had with Pierce, he told me he was so impressed with Allen's conditioning program he was going to implement it for himself this summer.

"You wait," he said, his eyes dancing, "I'm going to look like Ray someday."

joneb wrote:I disagree with the premise that people who were critical of Paul in the past must now eat some crow. Paul's game has changed for the better this year, partly because of the influence of KG and Ray. Paul was guilty of forcing things too much in recent years, and I stand by that criticism of him during recent years. But I am happy to see that he has learned to trust his teammates now, and it is rare to see him force anything these days.