The Celtics beat LeBron James and Kobe Bryant helping the team win this year

First-year Celtics assistant coach Sam Cassell was part of the last Boston team to win a championship in 2008, now he’s helping this year’s team write its own history

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

“Doc Rivers told me he brought me here to win one playoff game,” Cassell told The Messenger. “And I was like ‘One playoff game? I could do more than one playoff game.’ But he said, ‘I need you to win one playoff game for me.’”

Cassell, then 38, came in as the veteran anchor on a bench that would eventually help lead a Finals victory against Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers. Now, he is a first-year assistant coach on a Celtics team looking for its first championship since. Cassell, armed with that experience, has the task of helping Boston’s current core reach that same goal, but in a very different NBA than the one he played in when Rivers told him to win a playoff game.

That game ended up being Game 1 of the 2008 Eastern Conference semifinals between Boston and the Cleveland Cavaliers. Against a 23-year-old LeBron James, Cassell came off the bench and played nearly the entire fourth quarter. He led the Celtics with 10 points in the quarter while limiting James to just two points on just one of eight shot attempts. Boston won 76-72 en route to a seven-game series victory.

“Thoroughbred,” Cassell said of James, now with the Los Angeles Lakers, on the court that night. “He was fast.”

If the Celtics and Lakers wrote another chapter in their famous rivalry in this year’s NBA Finals, how would Boston need to change its approach from the game Cassell played in?

“Times are different now, man. That game was a totally different basketball game, absolutely grind out, punch in the face kind of basketball game,” Cassell said. “He’s a little older now, still playing at a high level.”

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

Former Celtics head coach Ime Udoka never coached another game for the Celtics after the Finals loss. He was suspended and later fired after an investigation into allegations of an improper relationship with a team employee, leaving Joe Mazzulla to take over as head coach.

Sam Cassell is in his first season as an assistant coach on the Boston Celtics and now has his own line of glasses ‘Coach’s Collection.’Courtesy of Sam Cassell

This year, Tatum and company are off to another fast start, racing out to a 14-4 record and the top spot in the early Eastern Conference race. Boston has the best odds to win the NBA Finals, according to The Messenger’s NBA season forecast. Tatum is right back in the thick of the MVP conversation after finishing fourth in voting last year, and the team is set to face the Indiana Pacers in the quarterfinals of the in-season tournament on Monday.

“These guys are way more skilled than us,” Cassell said of this year’s team compared to his championship group. “The teams are built differently. We was built on selfless, we were built on manpower, it was more of a power game back then.

“If we played in today’s era, with that team, there’s no way we beat these guys now.”

Still, Cassell came onto the coaching staff with one clear change in mind for Boston’s players.

“I just want them to work together more,” Cassell said, as part of a partnership with Zenni Optical to unveil his own line of glasses ‘Coach’s Collection.’ “We had a saying in Boston when I played there, a team saying … ‘I can’t be all I can be unless you can be all you can be.’”

Cassell says Boston won the championship in 2008 because of a culture of selflessness. It’s a theme similar to the one he is instilling in this year’s team.

He pointed to Kevin Garnett, whom he previously played with on the Minnesota Timberwolves, as an example of a player who agreed to take fewer shots and ultimately put up fewer points when he came to Boston.

“When you come into this locker room, check your ego at the door, and that’s what that team did and that’s what that team did and that’s the main reason we won the championship in 2008,” Cassell said. “He was having 25 points, 13 rebounds a night. He came to Boston, his scoring went down to 18 points and just 10 rebounds. That’s sacrifice right there.”

But Cassell also knows it takes more than just humility, at least from one player, to win a championship. It often takes a player stepping up and carrying the team in a big moment.

Cassell recalls later watching James and Paul Pierce go shot for shot in Game 7 of the Celtics-Cavs 2008 playoff series that he helped win in Game 1. Cassell did not play in Game 7, but from the sidelines, he watched a player in Pierce nearly match James’s 45 points with 41 in Boston’s 97-92 victory. He saw what it took to stack up against James in one of the finest moments of the early stage of his career.

“LeBron, with his greatness, he didn’t want those guys to lose,” Cassell said. “It was a battle of wills, and the other thing is, those two guys were defending each other … that’s what made it so special. That’s the biggest battle I’ve ever seen.”

Cassell says he’s shared the story with the Celtics players as motivation — and it’s not the last story he’s shared with them from that 2008 run, either as Bryant’s Lakers awaited them in the Finals. Heading into that series, Cassell says that he, Garnett, Ray Allen, Pierce and Rajon Rondo had no doubt they would defeat Bryant, despite his reputation.

“At that time, it didn’t matter what, I didn’t care who Kobe had on his team, there could have been two Kobe Bryants out there, they wasn’t beating us!” Cassell said.

Sam Cassell defended by Kobe Bryant during Game 1 of the 2008 NBA Finals in Boston.GABRIEL BOUYS/AFP via Getty Images

The Celtics went on to beat the Lakers in six games. After Cassell’s retirement in 2009, Boston faced Los Angeles in a 2010 Finals rematch but lost in seven games to Bryant. Now, another Finals loss and five straight playoff series losses to James later, Cassell knows it will take more than just stories of past victories to get over the hump this year. They’ll need to contend with a completely new generation of elite competition and play by an entirely new set of rules.

“This is their story, we already had our story, this is their story, they work their own story,” Cassell said. “So I don’t need to talk about what we did, this is their story.”