Dave Cowens is sitting around in a rugby shirt and a pair of grey cotton slacks, feeding his electric juicer with apple slices. As he gulps down the glasses of frothy, fresh-fruit juice, he sits quietly on a stool in his kitchen.

There is no despair in his face, no sign that he is playing for a team which is 1-7 and fighting with the New Jersey Nets for sole possession of the cellar in the NBA East. He does not seem worried that John Havlicek is closing in on age 40 or that JoJo White is starting to notice more grey hairs.

The Celtic center does not even seem very worried about having turned 28 years of age just two weeks earlier. His team is on the skids, but the big redhead from Kentucky is not panicking--he is sure the Celtics will bounce back. It is just a matter of time.

"We have enough talent, we just have to break out of the slump," he said last week in an exclusive interview with The Crimson. "We've just got to have a little patience."

But for Cowens and the rest of Boston's Celtics, losing is a new game; Celtic history is a glorious one, and learning to cope with so much defeat is what Dave Cowens says is the big issue right now.

"The pressure to win is a nice kind of pressure," he explains. "When you're losing you come in with a negative kind of pressure...players quit early...they don't give themselves a chance."

He says that a team that's a winner will keep playing when it's behind because "it' knows how to win and doesn't know how to lose." But now, the Celtics are fighting against a losing attitude.

"It's an intangible that's not in the statistics. It's an underlying negative bias," explains the Celtics' first-round pick in the 1970 draft. "Upfront no one's thinking about losing, but in the back of his mind, he's wondering `why?'"

Wondering?

And the Celtics are indeed wondering now, having gone down to defeat so often in the season's first month.

"You can get tired of continually scrapping to come from behind," Cowens says. "We have to get back on the track and break ourselves out of it. Maybe we should go to a chemistry class and get the formula for winning."

But Cowens knows as well as everyone else that there's no simple formula. The first step for the Celtics, though, is to find themselves and regain some team unity.

"We just haven't worked together long enough, and it takes a few weeks or a month to develop some unity," Cowens says. "We have to play exemplary defense because of our small size. We have to get tough out front and put the pressure on outside. If we let teams set up and get the ball down low, we'll have trouble."

The cooperation necessary to carry out that type of tough team defense is what Cowens says the Celtics have been missing. They've also been missing the basket.

"Our outside shooting has not been up to par. We have to put the ball in the hole," the Florida State graduate says. "If not, teams will give us the long shots and play the percentages. That's where a coach comes in--he has to make the adjustments and work with the percentages."