And while Kevin Garnett and Rajon Rondo take turns acting as perhaps the team’s most irreplaceable players, and Ray Allen remains the model of consistency, Paul Pierce is the Boston Celtics. Drafted by them, raised by them, hurt by them, loved by them, winning with them.

If I was in the same position, in the same rotation, I’m going to jump again and again and again,” Perkins told Yahoo! Sports. “I don’t care. A lot of people are afraid of humiliation or don’t know how to handle embarrassment or would even get embarrassed. I don’t care….That’s my job. How will my teammates look at me if next time I just back out the way and just let him dunk when I’m supposed to be defensive-minded, a shot-blocker? That would be a coward move on me. He’d just have to dunk on me again.

Chemistry is something that you don’t just throw in the frying pan and mix it up with another something, then throw it on top of something, then fry it up and put it in a tortilla and put in a microwave, heat it up and give it to you and expect it to taste good. You know? For those of you who can cook, y’all know what I’m talking about. If y’all can’t cook, this doesn’t concern you.

Well, I’ll tell you this, if there are hints of psychedelia to the High Flying Birds then Gaz and Brian have taken those hints and exploded them. They say that they’ve finished but they still haven’t delivered it. I know they’re still tweaking it, making it go even further out there. I think there’s going to be about ten intense psychedelic songs and three songs that are on the High Flying Birds album but reworked by them. How we’ve envisaged it is like a modern take on Dark Side Of The Moon, with lots of texture and ambient noise on it…

Jay-Z is the president of the world. Even now that he’s not my label president I’ll call him up and ask something like, “Hey, can you get me tickets to Michael Jackson’s funeral?” Done. Jay-Z is like Mr. Wolf in Pulp Fiction. This is when we were releasing Game Theory, back in 2006. Lawyers were holding up the record because of the “You and Whose Army” sample. Jay-Z was still president of the label then. I was like, “Can you get me on the phone with those guys in five minutes?” He was like, “Yeah.” I said, “Do you know those guys?” He said, “No.” I was confused. So I asked, “Well, how are you going to get through to those guys?” He said, “Watch.” Sure enough, in five minutes I was jogging on the treadmill talking to the Radiohead guys. Lawyers can’t make it work, but Jay-Z can.

…someone came in and said ‘Five minutes to stage time’, and we said to Morrissey ‘Come back and see us for a drink afterwards, we’re having an after-show party’, and he said ‘Oh don’t worry about that, I’m only staying for the first three songs’. We’re like ‘Well, at least he’s being honest’.