Pregame – Austin Rivers Talks About Facing Father

If you haven’t been paying attention to your Celtics news over the past 48 hours, you may have missed the fact that Doc Rivers and his son, Austin Rivers, will be meeting in an NBA game for the first time ever tonight.

We’re less than an hour away from tip-off and both Rivers just met with the media. After spending about 10 minutes with Austin, it’s pretty clear that youngster has a lot of his father in him. He cracked jokes throughout his media session but he also stayed on target and gave legitimate and great answers to reporters. His insight is that he’s looking forward to this contest much more than his dad.

“I don’t think my dad likes it. It’s just different, maybe too much for him, just because he has to balance more than I do,” Austin said. “I just have to go out there and play my best and help my team win. He has to kind of game plan against me, but he wants me to be happy at the same time. So he kind of has like a double-edged sword. ”

Austin is also humble enough to understand the enormity of tonight’s game. This will be just the fourth time in NBA history that a son will play against a team coached by his father. According to Austin, a lot of people would try to pretend that tonight’s matchup is ‘just another game.’ Austin, however, is soaking it all up.

“A lot of guys would try to hide the fact that they’re going against a team that they know very well and that they’re going against their father,” said Austin, “but it’s pretty much impossible to do that.

“I’m just going to have fun with it.”

As Austin alluded to, his father isn’t exactly looking forward to this situation. Doc is happy and proud that he’ll watch his son play in an NBA game in person, but he never contemplated that that one day he would actually need to game plan against Austin.

Well that game plan is about to go into effect and there is certainly a heightened vibe in the Garden tonight. I hope you don’t miss this historic event.