A dejected and disgusted Doc Rivers ripped into his team after the Celtics blew a 13-point lead and lost to the lowly Hornets. (AP)

Doc Rivers has been here before, and has had way too much experience this year in trying to rip his team a new one after blowing a double-digit lead and losing to an inferior opponent.

As a matter of fact, the Celtics did exactly that against the same lowly Hornets team they lost to at the Garden back on Jan. 16. But that apparently wasn’t motivation enough as the C’s blew a 13-point lead in the third quarter and lost to New Orleans on an Anthony Davis tip-in of an Eric Gordon missed layup with 0.3 seconds left to lift the Hornets over the Celtics, 87-86, Wednesday night.

Rivers needed just one minute, 45 seconds to tear his team a new one after the loss.

“We messed the game up [with] our spirit,” Rivers began. “I thought we thought we were going to win the game when we got the lead.

“I told our guys at halftime, you could see it in the middle of the second quarter. We went from being a solid, just good-looking basketball team, to ‘Showtime.’ And I believe in the basketball gods. When you mess with the game, the game messes you up. I thought we deserved it, I really did.

“I thought we activated them. I thought they were ready to go. You could just see it. We stopped making passes, we started dancing around, stopped defending, laughing. You could see our guys laughing and joking. I told our coaches, I said, ‘The basketball gods will get us tonight at some point.’ And unfortunately, it did. So, I thought we deserve everything we got.

“We don’t learn because we’ve done this three or four times this year and we just don’t learn. It’s disappointing.”

Rivers was asked just one question: Is he surprised this kind of play is coming so late in the season?

“It doesn’t matter at the point of the season, it really doesn’t,” he said. “But, it does get old. You could just see it. And once you do it, you can’t turn it back on. But I thought once we activated them, you could see the difference in the speed, the way they were playing and the way we were playing in the fourth quarter. We were trying to say, ‘Come on, now.’ And I was like, ‘No, you can’t do it now. You turned it off and you turned them on.’ I thought they were in a great place at the end. But we were asleep and we deserved it. I thought we absolutely deserved to lose the game. Whether or not we won it or not, we deserved to lose the game.”

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