Jeff Green will be a key figure in the Celtics' small-ball lineups. (AP)

WALTHAM — The buzzword around the Celtics these days is “versatility.” In Jason Terry, Courtney Lee and especially Jeff Green, coach Doc Rivers has a number of different lineup combinations he can use, and he plans to test them all. Rivers pointed to Rajon Rondo, who was getting stretched out behind the media scrum. “He’ll be very happy.”

Their last practice before departing for Istanbul was devoted entirely to using small lineups, although small is a relative term. The C’s believe that the 6-foot-9 Green can force matchups whether he’s at the three or the four and there’s even a thought of playing him and Paul Pierce together with two traditional bigs.

“We put it in [Sunday] but we didn’t work on it,” Rivers said. “Today we’re going to have almost exclusively have small lineups on the floor so that will be fun. This is the first year we’ve ever really worked on it and we’re going to work on it so we can do it every game.”

Green is the key because of his length and athleticism. Last season, Rivers used Mickael Pietrus as a smaller small forward with Pierce playing the four. That lineup was almost born out of desperation as a counter to Miami using LeBron James as the second big around a lineup of perimeter shooters.Rivers doesn’t just want to matchup, he wants to attack and he sees Green as a force in the open court.

“He’s the main guy when you talk about small lineups,” Rondo said. “He played the four at Oklahoma City, he stretched the floor with his shooting. We can get a lot of bigs on the floor as well. He can go from the four to the three. Defensively, he can check one through four, I believe. We expect a lot out of Jeff but he’s fine with that pressure.”

A key to making the smaller lineups work is also coming up with an offense that won’t stall when Rondo is off the court — a frequent occurrence last season. With no traditional backup point guard on the roster and Avery Bradley out for a few months, that task may fall to Terry.

“He’s a better ballhandler,” Rivers said. “I knew he could score of the dribble but he’s really a natural at the point. That surprised me. We have no choice right now with Avery out. We’re trying to create an offense where it’s not a point guard dominated offense, unless Rondo’s on the floor.”

The way each member of the Celtics brass lobbied for Jason Terry in his foursome at the team’s annual charity golf outing (owners Wyc Grousbeck and Steve Pagliuca won out, obviously), you wonder whether Doc Rivers & Co. lured Terry more for his ability to replace Ray Allen on the course rather than the court.

But really C’s president Danny Ainge sought Terry for three simple reasons: Scoring, scoring and more scoring.

“We wanted a scorer off the dribble,” said Rivers. “We do it every year right after the season: I always sit down and write Danny a long letter about needs, and that was my No. 1 need.”

So, Rivers knew exactly who to put on speed dial once NBA free agency began, and as Terry said, “When Doc calls, you answer.” The conversation probably went something like this: Your mission, Jason, should you choose to accept it, involves the recovery of a stagnant offense.

“My mission is to kill, whoever that is, whether it’s the Heat or whether it’s the Lakers — hopefully both,” said the 35-year-old Terry, “but that’s my mission, and that’s what I’m here to do.”

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Jason Terry is a big part of a revamped Celtics backcourt. (AP)

For the first time since the Big Three were originally conceived, the Celtics will have a new shooting guard lining up alongside Rajon Rondo, Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett. Not since Kendrick Perkins was traded to Oklahoma City have the Celtics undergone such an important change.

Ray Allen‘s departure for Miami was really the culmination of a transformation that was beginning to take shape last season. With Avery Bradley in the starting lineup, the Celtics suddenly became a dynamic defensive team that could also score points at a better-than expected rate. The C’s outscored their opponents by almost 20 points per 100 possessions with Bradley in the starting lineup.

Small sample size or no, Bradley’s emergence help point them in a direction that was less dependent on Allen’s shooting and off-the-ball movement, and increasingly reliant on Rondo’s gift for creating offense for others. In an interesting twist, the Celtics tried desperately to re-sign Allen, but when those efforts failed they turned their attention toward completing the transition toward a more versatile and potentially dynamic backcourt.

The two new additions are Jason Terry and Courtney Lee, shooting guards with entirely different styles of play. Read the rest of this entry »

As you can see from the embedded highlights of Pennsylvania’s annual Danny Rumph Classic (3:55-5:25), Celtics training camp invitee Dionte Christmas scored somewhere between 30 and 30,000 points during the charitable tournament commemorating the former Western Kentucky star.

Obviously, exhibition basketball performances should always be taken with a grain of salt, but it’s not easy coming up with 90 seconds of highlights — even when you film yourself dunking on a seven-foot rim in your driveway.

Christmas scored 21 points in the final, leading his #SHOWYALOVE squad to the title, and it’s not like he faced a bunch of folding chairs. The tournament featured Celtics teammate Courtney Lee — who sports a “R.I.P. Danny Rumph” tattoo and will wear his college teammate’s No. 11 in Boston — as well as Marreese Speights, Markieff and Marcus Morris, Hakim Warrick, Thomas Robinson, Rasual Butler and Jason Thompson, among others.

Christmas’ Danny Rumph Classic effort might provide zero indication that he’ll succeed in camp this September, let alone make the Celtics roster, but there’s further evidence that he could contribute to the C’s this season beyond a boatload of 3-pointers and a bunch of dribble drives in a Philadelphia gym.

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Over the past week, the digital notebook filled up with interviews of Celtics Avery Bradley, Dionte Christmas, Kris Joseph and Courtney Lee in addition to a conversation with Syracuse assistant coach Adrian Autry.

Most of those discussions can be found in Green Street blog posts on Lee, Bradley and Joseph, but plenty of compelling quotes ended up on the cutting room floor. Here are those deleted scenes.

ADRIAN AUTRY, Syracuse assistant coach

• On Fab Melo: “I think Fab is with the right team. With the personnel they have, the professionalism they have and Doc Rivers, you’re going to see him to continue to get better. He wants to be very, very good. He wants to be a great player. You’ll continue to see him get better, just like he made leaps and bounds with us from his first year to his second. He works hard in the gym. He gives 110 percent. He’ll be fine.”
• On Joseph’s character: “It being my first year coming in, he made my job a lot easier. He was the leader of our group, he was talented, and he caught on to everything very quickly. We hit it off right away. He was the first person I reached out to when I got the job. … I always knew about his talent, and I was excited to work with all the tools that he had to offer, but when I got to spend some time with him and talk about his background, it took me to another level.”
• On Syracuse’s zone: “A lot of elements of our zone are man-to-man. In practice, we do man-to-man segments because teams play us man-to-man. Our guys have an idea.”

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Here’s all you need to know about Celtics sign-and-trade acquisition Courtney Lee before this NBA season begins: He took less money to play in Boston, and he doesn’t care whether he starts or comes off the bench.

“I had a lot of different offers from a lot of different teams, but the one I really wanted to come to was Boston,” Lee said Thursday from the Boston Children’s Museum, where the Celtics held their Summer Soiree to benefit the Shamrock Foundation. “So, I spoke to my agent and I spoke to my family. It was a decision that I had to take less money to come here, but in that I’ll be winning, I’ll have a chance to play on TV. That’s what everybody wants to do. They want to win big and a chance to win a ring, so it was a no-brainer for me.”

In town for his first public appearance as a member of the Celtics and to find a place to live for at least part of his four-year, $21.5 million contract, Lee joins a shooting guard logjam along with Avery Bradley and Jason Terry after being signed-and-traded from the Rockets in a complicated deal that involved the Celtics shipping JaJuan Johnson, E’Twaun Moore, Sean Williams, Sasha Pavlovic and three second-round draft picks out of Boston.

Still, when asked if he preferred starting to backing up Bradley upon his return from surgery on both shoulders, Lee said all the right things while not giving up too much outside of the fact he and Celtics coach Doc Rivers have already discussed his role “in details” over dinner multiple times.

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The NBA draft is over. Summer League is over. And for the Celtics, free agency is essentially over. So, with the addition of former Hawks center Jason Collins and the training camp invites to Summer League stars Dionte Christmas and Jamar Smith over the weekend, the C’s could field a 15-man roster as currently constituted.

The depth chart is beginning to take shape. While Danny Ainge could still welcome Mickael Pietrus, Keyon Dooling or another player into the fold for the veteran minimum, the hard part is done. None of the four recently re-signed players or eight new additions could even be traded until December 15, and Paul Pierce, Rajon Rondo and Avery Bradley don’t appear to be on the block, so any changes to this group would be a minor tweak at best.

That being said, let’s take a look at how this season’s depth chart stacks up to the one that finished the playoffs.

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