He had prepared his team all week as if 76ers star Allen Iverson, the league's leading scorer, would be starting and performing at his usual level. That Iverson has had one full practice after missing the final 14 games of the regular season with a fractured metacarpal bone in his left hand had no impact on O'Brien whatsoever.

"He's the MVP of the league until proven otherwise," O'Brien said. "He's a great, great player who has worn us out. We understand how good a player he is and how big a task it is to stop him from putting large numbers on the board."

Check it out: Iverson scored 37, 47, 28 and 22 points in the four regular-season meetings between the teams; when he suffered his injury on March 22, struck across the hand by the Celtics' Tony Battie, he scored 18 additional points before leaving at halftime for X-rays. The only other player in the league to score as many as 100 points against the Celtics during the season was New York's Latrell Sprewell.

"I think he wears everybody out, not necessarily specific to the Boston Celtics," O'Brien said. "He's so fast, he's great in the open court. The first two games [of the season], he absolutely pounded us. . .When a guy has the ability to shoot deep shots when he's guarded and they go in, you don't have many answers for that."

The Celtics had all the answers they needed in Game 1 of their best-of-five, first-round series. They left Iverson shooting 4-for-15 from the floor, missing his last 10 tries; Eric Snow missed his last nine, and the Sixers were a fractured 11-for-36 after intermission.

"There's a fine line that we try to walk against Iverson," O'Brien said, "and that is that we tell the guys that are going to guard him to make sure that they get under his chin and not make it comfortable for him to shoot the basketball, forcing the drive, knowing that we're going to have traffic waiting for him. And our guys just overstepped the line [early]. . .and we fouled early, and that hurt us. I stayed concerned the whole game."