Doc Rivers knows the low points of coaching.

A year ago, Doc Rivers was on all the "coaches on the hot seat" lists. Google the phrase "Fire Doc Rivers," and you will find nearly 200,000 results, from message boards, blogs, and mainstream media alike. 

He was an object of scorn. Fans and pundits alike targeted Rivers as the weak link on a weak team. It was almost a joke: "Fire Doc Rivers" became the solution to almost any problem that came up in Boston.

The story of his coaching career has turned around 180 degrees with a rousing defeat of the Los Angeles Lakes in Game 6.

Doc Rivers is a champion, and he's not riding on anybody's coattails.

This is David Thorpe, from TrueHoop's liveblog of Game 6: "I actually feel like if the coaching staffs were switched, L.A. would be winning. Doc and Co. have kicked Mr. Nine Rings up and down the floor."

Tonight, Rivers has scaled the heights, and must be one of the happiest guys in sports. From his post-game press conference:

If you can, can you just think back a year to where you were coming to this point now?
Yeah, well, I can tell you where I was at. I was probably on the third hole somewhere golfing and hoping that we were going to improve our team.

You know, this is really sweet, obviously, for a lot of reasons. Just the players, just hanging in there with all of us this year. We really pushed them to play together as a team and a group, and they did it. Really all the praise goes to them. ...

We talked about adversity all year, and we kept saying that it had to come our way and we had to accept it and embrace it. We talked about that before the game this morning. I brought up all those [challenges] and then I just basically said, and as a group, we said it together, no excuses, don't use them. We don't need them. I just thought we had a very tough team mentally in that way.

When you took Paul, Kevin and Ray out of the game with 4:01 remaining, could you sort of talk about that? Was that something you had planned all along? Was it an impromptu decision? How did that play out?
Well, I thought about it a minute before that, and I just thought they came in as a group, and I thought we should take them out as a group. So I did think about it right before I did it.

You know, I refused to allow [team officials] to give me any plans. They all wanted to sit me down and talk about parade plans, and I told them I didn't want to hear about it. I didn't want to talk about it. So really I was unprepared for anything at the end of the game.

It's probably sweeter that way.

And when they came off, what was said?
Just we loved each other. They all said "thank you," and I said "thank you" back. Paul, obviously we ... it's just so sweet. He just kept saying "thank you, thank you, thank you for sticking with me again," and I kept saying the same thing to him.

So it was really a nice moment.

(AP Photo/Elise Amendola)