Scott Souza beats the rest of the beat reporters to the punch by using his blog to post the top news stories from his perspective.  Here are some highlights:

"P.J. Brown is missed in this whole thing as far as I am concerned," said Doc Rivers. "He gave us length, which is so important. Glen (Davis) and Leon (Powe) are great, but they don’t give us length. For me, that’s the biggest fear going into this year."

So can that fear be alleviated?

"(Not) unless we can talk him into coming back in February," Rivers said.

Couldn't agree more.

"The biggest thing I am going to miss with Pose is, when teams tried to go small, we put Pose at the four and just played our normal way. We didn’t change our style. Now we are going to go to someone else to play that role, probably Paul (Pierce)."

I think Paul can handle that as long as the other team is going small, but I'd rather have him playing his natural 3 spot.  But oh well.

The other bit of news came from Kendrick Perkins, who agreed that he will have to take it easy to start camp after shoulder surgery in early July. He said he is targeting the third preseason game - which would be the Oct. 11 game in Manchester, N.H. - to return to the floor.

"I don’t want to rush it," Perkins said, "and make it worse. I want to take my time and make it 100 percent when I come back on the court. … I am doing all the drill work in training camp. It’s probably the week after training camp when I will start doing the contact stuff. I’m expected to play in the third preseason game, so I am pretty excited about that.

"I was expecting the worst (with recovery time). I am just following doctor’s orders with the recovery time. But as long as Doc (Rivers), the coaches, everybody’s OK with it, I shouldn’t have a problem with it either."

Get well soon Perk.  It will be nice to see what this O'Bryant kid has in the preseason, but when the games count, we need our Beast.

Also, here's official news that Cassell has been signed. (Celtics.com)