But he sure won't be forgotten.

About 12 hours before he was scheduled to fly to Charlotte to have surgery on his left wrist, Bell basically begged Don Nelson to put him in the game Wednesday night at Boston.

The coach obliged.

Twenty-three gutty minutes later, Bell had made a bunch of new -- and very impressed -- friends.

"That showed a lot," Anthony Morrow said of his new teammate. "He wanted to be right there with his teammates, and that's a reflection of the kind of guy he is."

Bell, acquired Monday as part of the Stephen Jackson trade, admitted simply putting a hand on an opponent was painful. But staring at possible season-ending surgery, and with his contract up at season's end, the veteran wanted to send a message to his much younger teammates.

"It's hard to sit there and watch when you know a team is as undermanned as we are," he explained. "It wasn't done for any other reason than I wanted to help. I felt like I had a responsibility."

Bell, who could miss as little as a month and as much as the rest of the season depending upon the severity of the torn ligament in his wrist, hopes the Warriors take that kind of attitude to the court Friday and the 70 times after that this season.

Already without Brandan Wright and Kelenna Azubuike for the season, with Bell possibly never coming back and Jackson definitely never returning, it won't be easy for the Warriors to duplicate Bell's effort in what figures to be a long season. But his 23 painful minutes Wednesday night will always be there to be called upon in hard times.

CELTICS 109, WARRIORS 95: Just being competitive with seven healthy players on the final day of a five-game Eastern trip was asking a lot of the Warriors on Wednesday night. But leading the 2007-08 champions 54-53 in the third quarter? It was enough to make the flight home a lot more enjoyable than you might expect of a team that had just endured a 1-4 trip and traded away its best player. "We really did some good things," Warriors coach Don Nelson concluded. Getting run out 27-13 in the final 10 minutes of the third quarter by the vastly superior opponent was not one of the good things, even if it was inevitable. That was the ballgame.