Here’s what the Celtics don’t care about in regards to the Miami Heat: The Decision, the fallout from The Decision, the media attention, the fallout from the media attention, the hype, the predictions and any of the fallout from the hype and the predictions.
They’re not angry about it, nor do they do they feel disrespected. If anything, the Celtics seem amused by the whole spectacle, like the old man sipping his pint in the corner of the bar watching the 20-somethings ordering shots.
On Tuesday night, in the most hyped season opener the NBA has ever seen, the world will be watching to see just what LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh have wrought on the league. Some 250 credentialed members of the media will ring a sold-out TD Garden, giving it a playoff atmosphere. The fans will be at a fever pitch, ready to unleash all matter of hellfire and invective down on the Heat and the press will be waiting for any signs of stress or turmoil.  
The Celtics? They will be more than minor players in this drama -- but let’s be honest about something -- they’re not the reason for this amount of scrutiny, and they know it. Not that they’re complaining.
“All eyes will be on the game in Boston, but all eyes really will be on Miami,” Doc Rivers said. “Once the game starts it doesn’t matter. Whoever wins will be anointed the Eastern Conference champs for a day. And then the next day, we’ll play Cleveland.” 
If you want to know why the Celtics seem so unmoved by all the attention, it’s important to remember that no less an authority than Kevin Garnett gave it his blessing months before it came to pass. Not in so many words, necessarily, but take a step back in time to May 15 after the Celtics had eliminated LeBron’s Cavaliers in the playoffs. Garnett was asked if he had any advice to give James on the eve of his free agency.
“Loyalty is something that hurts you at times, because you can’t get youth back,” Garnett said that night. “I can honestly say that if I could go back and do my situation over, knowing what I know now with this organization, I’d have done it a little sooner.”
One man’s personal quest is another’s selfish obsession, but understand that the Celtics have no ill feeling toward LeBron or Miami. They see what James did as a business decision, if not a basketball one, and while others have tied themselves in knots bemoaning the circumstances that brought the Heat together, the Celtics have taken a refreshingly mature position on the matter.
“They’ve gotten a lot of criticism that they don’t deserve,” Rivers said earlier in camp. “I think LeBron did everything legal. He played it out and then he became a free agent. It didn’t bother me. I guess I’m an old-school guy but it didn’t bother me in that way. But it bothered a lot of people. For whatever reason, it did.”
Regardless of the merits of the way it all went down -- with the worst excuse for a television show since Cop Rock as its cultural tipping point -- that’s really what this is all about. James, Wade and Bosh realized that they couldn’t win on their own, so they decided to do something about it. This annoyed the vast majority of people. The Celtics, frankly, applauded them for it. 
“It was good to see guys make some decisions on what they wanted for themselves,” Garnett said over the weekend. “It’s good for competition. It doesn’t go deeper than that. If you ask some other guys I’m sure they’ll have a different opinion.”
Oh, there have been opinions. Michael Jordan said he never would have called Larry Bird or Magic Johnson and asked them to play with him, as if James or Wade had anyone half as good as Scottie Pippen on their side. Charles Barkley ripped James for joining “Wade’s team,” as he called it, while conveniently forgetting that he orchestrated his own franchise-hopping maneuvers in his day. The Orlando Magic, meanwhile, have lost their collective minds about all the attention that has swung their in-state rivals way.
But the Celtics have stayed above the fray.
“Dwyane Wade is special,” Paul Pierce said. “Bosh is special. LeBron is special. On their worst days they’re better than a lot of people in the league. Regardless of their chemistry, these guys understand the game. They have high basketball IQs and they’ll figure it out.”
Pierce should know. He went through this before, albeit on a different scale. They all remember what it was like back in 2007 when everyone wanted to know how it would work pairing three superstars from other teams. The Celtics answered those questions then, and continue to answer them every day.
They could offer all kinds of advice about what Miami will go through this season, but it’s not their problem. Let everyone else worry about Miami and how LeBron, Wade and Bosh turned the league on its head and used the first week of July as their own private playground. The Celtics just don’t care.
What they do care about is how they will defend James and Wade now that their respective bailout options are each other instead of Mo Williams and Quentin Richardson. They care about keeping Bosh out of the paint and keeping a defender between their opponents and the basket.
They care about integrating two new centers into their own lineup and getting through the first 10 games without Delonte West. They care about their own process and what they’re trying to achieve.
“We have yet to play a whole game in my opinion,” Rivers said. “That concerns me. We’ve been a spurt team and that concerns me. We’re a veteran team and spurts and veteran teams usually don’t go together.”
It’s not going to be easy and they know that too. “No cakewalks,” Rivers said the other day. “That’s OK.”
For the Celtics, this season is obviously not about Tuesday night in the Garden. It’s not about LeBron, D-Wade or Bosh. They’re one of the only teams in the NBA that is actually bigger than this game and that’s what will make this matchup so appealing.