He is hearing it now, on a regular basis, in a loud, obnoxious and often profane way. Rick Pitino at times looks to be almost anesthetized to the catcalls, jeers and other boorish remarks from the frustrated fans of the Boston Celtics.

	Rick Pitino, right, and the Celtics' players didn't always see eye-to-eye.

At one point recently, he heard the voices of the people telling him to go back to Kentucky. Or to head west to UCLA. Or to take over in Indiana. Anywhere but Boston, where he is presiding over a crumbling team.

"This is unbearable," he confided to longtime lieutenant Jim O'Brien. "I wish the fans would make up their minds and settle on one place."

A sense of humor is a much needed, but nonetheless a lacking commodity these days in Boston. Pitino, who took over the team in 1997 amid pomp, splendor and grand expectations, now looks more and more like Sonny Corleone at the toll booth. His team is finishing up a favorable schedule stretch (17 of 25 games at home) in a most unfavorable, unpleasant manner. Where once he was given a long rope, he now is being fitted for a noose.

		The decline has been so steep and precipitous that even the few remaining Pitino defenders in Boston are at a loss. Where once it could be argued that he still was a good coach, even that part of his resume is under assault. It's not as if he has forgotten to coach, or no longer prepares, or doesn't devise appropriate schemes and sets.

It's gone from not if he'll leave soon, but when. Pick a date, any date. Will he survive the month of January? He surely can't be serious about still coaching in February, when the road-phobic Celtics have a killer West Coast trip. Surely he can't be thinking about finishing the season, heretofore a given until the team's recent bungee jump?

There are as many rumors as to his future employment as there are guesses as to when he and rarely seen/rarely heard owner Paul Gaston will agree to go their separate ways. Indiana has an interim head coach, but it's also in Bloomington. Kentucky is coached by a close friend, Tubby Smith. UNLV will be on probation. UCLA already has a coach. No one is mentioning another NBA post; his reputation as a judge of pro talent has been shattered.

It doesn't matter to most citizens in Celtic Nation. They just want him to go and barring a miraculous turnaround on the court, they will get their wish.

Most thought it would end this year, but probably not this way. Pitino had some justifiably optimistic hopes for this year's team. It was playing in a terrible conference and had lost a slew of close games last year. It had developed a winning mentality at the FleetCenter, something he figured would continue while the team picked up its pathetic play on the road.

	Pierce

	Walker

	Anderson

Instead, what could go wrong, has gone wrong. Not even the cushy schedule has helped. The Celtics penciled in 30 wins at home this season as a must, including 13 in the first six weeks. They instead split their first 16 home games, the undeniable low point coming last week with successive blowout losses to the Bulls and the Kings. They remain uniformly horrible on the road, where they won once in their first eight games. Point guard Kenny Anderson, valuable despite an obvious aversion to playing the Pitino style, broke his jaw and missed 16 games.

The decline has been so steep and precipitous that even the few remaining Pitino defenders in Boston are at a loss. Where once it could be argued that he still was a good coach, even that part of his resume is under assault. It's not as if he has forgotten to coach, or no longer prepares, or doesn't devise appropriate schemes and sets. It's that whatever he tells his players, they inevitably ignore it and go their own way. That doesn't leave a lot of room for interpretation: the players have tuned him out or else they are incorrigibly dim.

They don't get back on defense, despite the coach's ongoing pleas. Dirk Nowitzki strafed them last week with a rebound and a Barkley-esque coast-to-coast jaunt capped by a dunk. They have no intimidator inside and are routinely among the worst teams in defensive field goal percentage.

The players don't move the ball, often settling for a quick hoist or an ill-advised three-pointer. Antoine Walker gets double-teamed or even triple-teamed in the post and what does he do? He tries to drive through it as if he were John Riggins. Paul Pierce is showing a disturbing tendency to do the same. Pitino wants them to pass. They don't.

The fans who once filled the Fleet Center to the rafters not too long ago (there were 15 straight sellouts to close Pitino's first year) are staying away in historic numbers. Prior to this season, there had been only four Celtic crowds of fewer than 15,000 in the five-year history of the FleetCenter. That covered 189 games. This season, there have been 10 in 16 games, including the three lowest pro basketball crowds since Larry Bird's rookie season. The otherwise entertaining Dallas Mavericks drew a FleetCenter record low of 11,327 on Monday.

Among those choosing not to bother these days is Joanne Pitino, the coach's wife. She has attended most home games over the past three years, but was said by her husband to be out of town last week, conveniently missing the Chicago (104-86) and Sacramento (104-81) debacles. However, friends say she no longer attends games because of the incessant booing directed at her husband.

Pitino, of course, set this up himself by promising to leave at the end of this season if he saw no improvement. He had no reason to do so, being under contract to coach the team through this season and two more. Now, possibly for the first time, he may actually regret something he said. The pressure on him to live up to his promise is enormous and it may get so overwhelming that he will have no choice but to accelerate the timetable.

After another disturbing home loss -- a 24-pointer to the Sixers prior to Thanksgiving -- Pitino went postal in the locker room. The following day, when word of his words got out, he held a news conference, essentially to reiterate what he has said all along: he'll go if the team doesn't turn it around. He also said that if things continued to deteriorate, he'd meet with Gaston in January and recommend a coaching change.

That meeting could be held earlier than planned. The Celtics play in New York on Thursday night and that happens to be where Gaston's business is located. One doesn't have to reach to envision a "discussion" where Pitino could take the honorable way out, reminding people that the team has draft picks (two first rounders other than their own) with which to rebuild and that he has tried his best.

No one will ever accuse Rick Pitino of slacking. But as a former teacher once said, "it's not how hard you work. It's how you work hard." The Celtics are about to embark on a stretch which, if history is any guide, could be very ugly. Another season is all but shot, the team is cloaked in apathy, and the coach is running out of time and options.

Peter May, who covers the NBA for the Boston Globe, is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.