The Celtics won a franchise record 68 games during the 1972-73 season.  However, the team suffered a heartbreaking Game 7 loss to the Knicks in the Eastern Conference Finals.  Please take me back to that series – what stands out most in your mind?

The Knicks had the second best team in the NBA that season.  There wasn’t anyone in the West that could contend, so we know that whoever won the series would end up winning it all.  That’s the way both teams looked at it.  We all felt the Eastern Conference Finals was for the championship.

We lost Havlicek for that series to a shoulder injury, and that really caused problems early on.  We fell behind 3-1 in that series before turning it around and forcing a Game 7 back in Boston.  We were confident going in – we had Havlicek back, and he started – but we ran out of gas.  We spent everything just clawing back to even the series at 3-3, and we didn’t shoot the ball well.

Even though we didn’t win, we felt we had a great team.  We came within one win of matching the ’71-72 Lakers for best season ever, and we felt just as good as that team.  But John’s injury hurt, no question about that.  It was a tough series to lose.

When I interviewed Paul Westphal, he had this to say about you:  “There is so much that stands out about Dave, but if I had to pick one thing it would be the intensity that he brought to the court.  The look in his eyes is something that I can’t find words to adequately describe.  You had to see that look for yourself to know what I’m talking about.”  In your own words, what one characteristic most personifies the way you played the game?

Enthusiasm.  I was very much a Dennis the Menace on the court.  My attitude was to play all out, and to just let it rip.  I was always running.  I stayed in constant motion, running fast and trying to wear my opponent down.  I viewed my job as an individual contest within a team contest, and the object was to outwork everyone that I was matched up against.  When the ball went up I wanted to be the one coming down with it.

Take me back to the ‘70s.  What was the style of basketball like back then?

There was a much more crowd-pleasing brand of basketball being played.  The ABA had the great flair, and the NBA had the old school franchises.  You had players like Tiny Archibald and Bob McAdoo.  You had Rick Barry, Bobby Jones, David Thompson, Dr. J, Chet Walker, Dan Issel, Bob “Butterbean” Love.  You had Rudy Tomjanovich, who was one of the greatest shooters to ever play the game.  It was a great era, but it gets overlooked because of the players who came along during the ‘80s – the Birds, the Magics, the Jordans.

I’m not a fan of the three-point play, which has become such a big deal today.  The big men don’t get the touches that they got when I played, and a lot of it has to do with the three-pointer.  Today you see so much isolation.  There was much more ball movement back then, which made it more fun to watch.

By 1973 you were the NBA All-Star Game MVP and the league’s Most Valuable Player.   Fans tend to place their emphasis on the league’s awards themselves, rather than the journey that culminates in a player being honored as the best.  Some of today’s players seem to have the same mindset.  But with you, it seemed as if you were all about the journey, and that every award was a by-product of your love to play the game.  Is this a fair assessment?

It was an honor to be voted the league’s best, because the players and coaches voted for the MVP during that time.  It meant something to have my peers recognize my effort.  I was never out to impress some guy who has never played the game.  I shared the Rookie of the Year award with Geoff Petrie – it was a media thing, so it didn’t mean as much to me as winning the MVP award.  Back then the award wasn’t such a big deal – at least not like it is today.  When you look at a picture of me receiving the award, you can see that the ball is made out of wrapping tape.  You wouldn’t see that today – it’s much more of a production, and it means much more in terms of money.

Being named MVP probably had a lot to do with our winning 68 games that year.  We only lost fourteen games, so you figure somebody on the team had to get it.  John [Havlicek] had to be considered, because he had such a great season and he was our go-to guy on offense.

In Game 7 of the 1974 NBA Finals, head coach Tommy Heinsohn changed his strategy against Milwaukee center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.  Please take me back to that game, and your role in slowing down the Bucks’ star.

Up until that point I’d played four years in the NBA with zero help on Kareem.  It was a case where you had to suck it up, and on many occasions he made me feel like anything but an MVP.  My goal was always to stay close statistically – if he scored 35 then I wanted to at least score twenty, so that there was only a fifteen point differential.  Today Shaq can go off for 40 and hold his opponent to four, which is a huge amount to make up.

Tommy decided to double up on Kareem in that game, and it came as a real surprise to the Bucks.  We’d never practiced this scheme, but our team was smart enough to pull it off.  We wanted to slow down the Bucks’ offense, and make players like Cornell Warner and Curtis Perry beat us.  We wanted them to shoot, which was something that they weren’t used to doing.  We also wanted to keep the ball out of Oscar Robertson’s hands and make other players handle it.  Don Chaney’s sole focus in that game was to dog Oscar.  He kept the pressure on him, took a lot of time off the clock, and forced the Bucks into rushing their offensive sets.  The plan worked perfectly.  We won Game 7 on the road, 102-87, and brought home the championship.