LOS ANGELES – The longer Doc Rivers sat in the posh hotel restaurant awaiting the arrival of owner Donald Sterling, the more determined he became to never work for the Los Angeles Clippers. Thirty minutes passed, and no Sterling. Forty-five minutes, and nothing. To hell with this, Rivers seethed.

"I'm out," Rivers remembers telling himself. "I must not be too important to them."

He climbed out of his chair, marched through the lobby, out the doors and instructed a taxi driver to whisk him away. Back at the table, Clippers management wondered to themselves: Will he ever come back?

Twenty-two years ago, the Atlanta Hawks had traded him to the Clippers and a proposed sit-down with management couldn't have gone worse – if it had gone at all.

"I didn't want to play for them," Rivers told Yahoo Sports. "Their reputation was so bad."

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Over lunch in a Century City restaurant last week, Rivers considered the irony of it all and laughed. For weeks after the trade in 1991, Rivers refused to speak with Clippers president Andy Roeser. He played a season and moved on to the New York Knicks. All these years later, Roeser had come recruiting Rivers again. This time, everything had changed. The franchise's commitment had transformed, and the Clippers were offering Rivers the power, pay, personnel and locale to chase championships.

"The risk is all mine," Rivers, 51, said. "To go to an organization that hasn't won but [two] playoff series in their entire history, in a town where the other team is the best franchise in sports history – that's risk.

"But the opportunity – for me – gives me life. If we get this right, it will be the story of stories to tell. At this point in my life, the gamble is worth it."

From the late summer sunlight to the talent marching into training camp, the Clippers have reinvigorated Rivers. And yet through all the deft work undertaken to upgrade the Clippers' roster this summer, Rivers found himself talking far too much about his departure in Boston, too little about his arrival in Los Angeles.

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Those nine seasons with the Celtics were the best of his basketball life, and they're forever embedded within him now. Rivers wished he could've been spared the criticism on his way out, but that was inevitable and he's come to understand that better now.

"It dragged out to a point where there were bound to be hurt feelings," Rivers said. "The truth was this: I really didn't want to go through a rebuild. I've been through three – when I first got to Orlando, and then when Grant Hill went down again. And I had been through one in Boston. It's easy to say, 'Just do it,' but for a coach, it's brutal. Showing up, getting your ass kicked, it's brutal."

"It takes a lot out of you. At the end of the year, when we lost, I had full intentions of doing it. The more I kept thinking about it, I knew it wasn't in me again. At least not there again.



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"But when the deal first fell apart, I told [Celtics president of basketball operations] Danny [Ainge], 'I'll coach again here, I'll come back.' And then, a day later, I told him: I don't know if I can. That's how wishy-washy I was. But when I said that, Danny said, "OK, let me get back to work and get this thing done.'"

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