Having the Celtics back in the Finals is good for us and good for the NBA
Globe Staff, Updated June 5, 2024, 6:00 a.m.
With the Celtics tipping off Game 1 against the Mavericks Thursday night, we can look forward to a fortnight of fury featuring Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown against Dallas superstars Luka Dončić and (gulp) Kyrie Irving.
Having the Celtics in the Finals is a great development for Boston and NBA America. The league is always well-served when its signature franchise is featured in its showcase event.
Like the New York Yankees, the Green Bay Packers, and the Montreal Canadiens, the Celtics are synonymous with their sport. In the second half of the 20th century, when the fledgling NBA was coming of age, Bill Russell, Bob Cousy, and Red Auerbach put Boston’s parquet floor on the national sports map, winning 11 championships in 13 seasons.
In subsequent decades, as the torch was passed from Russell and Sam Jones to men named Havlicek, Cowens, Maxwell, Bird, Parish, and McHale, the Celtics continued winning championships — two in the 1970s and three more in the golden ’80s. It was also in the ’80s that Larry Bird and Magic Johnson teamed with Michael Jordan and commissioner David Stern to make the NBA a global entertainment entity.
While notions of Celtic Pride and Garden Mystique have largely endured, the franchise’s stretch of championship regularity stopped after Bird & Co. won their final crown on June 8, 1986.
Since that day, while NBA mini-dynasties thrived then died in Los Angeles (17 total championships, same as Boston), Chicago, San Antonio, and the Bay Area, the Celtics have won only one banner — in 2007-08 when Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, and Ray Allen crushed the Lakers in six games.
Now the Celtics are favorites to win again.
Coached by 35-year-old Joe Mazzulla, the Celtics won a league-best 64 games this season and are 12-2 in the playoffs, methodically toppling tomato cans from Miami, Cleveland, and Indiana. The Celtics are talented, deep, rested, and prepared for the return of starting center Kristaps Porzingis (calf), who hasn’t played since April 29. Just about everyone outside of the Dallas-Fort Worth region is picking Boston to win.
Tatum and Brown, superstars drafted by Danny Ainge (who learned at the foot of Auerbach), are in their seventh season together and will be playing in their second Finals. Two years ago, the Celtics led the Warriors, two games to one, before dropping the final three games to Steph Curry, Draymond Green & Co.
“We can learn from that experience being in the Finals,” Tatum said last weekend. “This go-around is a lot different. Obviously we’ve been there before, we came up short. It’s a great opportunity to make it to the Finals again. You don’t always get a second chance.”
The Celtics also feature guards Jrue Holiday (who won a ring with the Bucks) and Derrick White, a pair of terrific acquisitions by president of basketball operations Brad Stevens. And let’s not forget 38-year-old Al Horford, who has played in 181 career playoff games and is overdue for his first ring.
The Mavericks are a 5-seed who won only 50 regular-season games and lost two of two against Boston (the Celtics beat them by 28 in March). Dallas made some midseason trades and went 16-4 in its final 20 games, then 12-5 in the playoffs. The Mavericks’ best player is 25-year-old Dončić, a Bird clone from Slovenia, guaranteed to entertain and likely to win at least one game all by himself.
The Mavericks also have Irving, the capo di tutti capi of Boston sports villains. One of the most talented all-purpose guards in NBA history (don’t forget that he won a championship with LeBron James in Cleveland), Irving played only two seasons (2017-19) for the Celtics, yet managed to offend more Hub sports patrons than Bill Laimbeer, Ulf Samuelsson, and Alex Rodriguez combined.
Kyrie Irving celebrated with his Nets teammates after they
beat the Celtics in a playoff game at TD Garden in 2021
JIM DAVIS/GLOBE STAFF
Boston fans’ hatred for Irving is seemingly boundless. Bad blood was first spilled when Kyrie reneged on a pledge to re-sign with the Celtics on the eve of his second season in Green (”I wasn’t my best self,” Irving acknowledged Monday). This triggered five years of dueling insults between Irving and New England sports fans.
In 2020, then a member of the Brooklyn Nets, Irving burned sage around the parquet floor before a regular-season game. Later that season, in a series in which the Nets eliminated the Celtics from the playoffs, Irving stomped on the Celtics’ sacred midcourt logo, then was the target of a water bottle hurled from the stands. This led to Irving’s charge of “underlying racism and just treating people like they’re in a human zoo.”
One year later, Kyrie compared Boston fans to a “scorned girlfriend,” then flipped off the Garden crowd in the middle of a playoff joust. A few months after that, Irving offended all of humanity, retweeting an antisemitic social media post, which resulted in him getting suspended by his own team (Brooklyn’s front office stated that Irving was “unfit to be associated with the Nets”).
Irving effectively set fire to the Nets’ Dream Team he’d assembled (including Kevin Durant and James Harden), missed a bunch of games because he refused to get a COVID vaccination, and was eventually traded to Dallas. He has been a model citizen for Jason Kidd’s Mavericks, who’ve won one championship (2011) in their 44-year history.
There’s a playoff push to anoint Kyrie and Luka as the NBA’s best backcourt of all time.
This makes for interesting debate.
Warriors fans like Curry and Klay Thompson, while folks in LA can make a case for Magic Johnson and Byron Scott, or Jerry West and Gail Goodrich. Michael Jordan and Ron Harper were pretty good for the Bulls.
Naturally, the Celtics have candidates. John Havlicek occasionally paired in the backcourt with Jo Jo White. Dennis Johnson and Ainge won two championships together. Ray Allen and Rajon Rondo were a good combo for a couple of seasons.
Going back further, Auerbach had four Hall of Fame guards on the same championship team for three full seasons from 1958-61. Cousy and Sam Jones, who played six seasons together, combined to win 16 rings.
Cousy’s jersey No. 14 and Sam’s No. 24 will be hanging high above courtside when the Celtics and Mavericks get started Thursday night.
Dan Shaughnessy is a Globe columnist.
He can be reached at daniel.shaughnessy@globe.com.
Follow him @dan_shaughnessy.
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