NBA history spans 80 seasons, and as CelticsBlog readers well know, the Boston Celtics have won a league-high 18 championships. This month, we are recapping each of those title years.
The 2023-24 Boston Celtics and the quest for Banner 18 could be best exemplified by Thomas Wayne’s famous quote from the criminally underrated — if only due to the astronomical success of its sequel — Batman Begins: “Why do we fall, Bruce? So we can learn to pick ourselves up.”
Heading into the 2023 offseason, it seemed like the Celtics were destined to fall flat on their faces every year, only picking themselves up enough between each tumble to ensure the next collapse would hurt more than the last.
Every high point since the Big 3 won in 2008 had been marred by disappointment — a feeling Celtics fans would come to know well over the next 16 years.
The Big 3 only got back to the Finals once more, in 2010, and lost Games 6 and 7 in devastating fashion after taking a 3-2 lead against Kobe’s Lakers, allowing LA to win their second championship in a row and their 16th overall (if you count the Minneapolis titles).
The next year, LeBron joined the Miami Heat and formed a newer, younger Big 3 that immediately stole the spotlight and cruised past Boston 4-1 on their way to the Finals. When the Celtics met the Heat again in the 2012 Eastern Conference Finals, they lost the first two games before roaring back with three consecutive wins to take a 3-2 series lead heading back to Boston. Everything was perfectly teed up for the aging C’s to make one last triumphant run to the Finals before Rajon Rondo could lead the team into a new era. Unfortunately, LeBron put up one of his greatest performances ever in Game 6 and sealed the deal in Game 7 while on his way to winning his first ring. And just like that, the balloon popped and the dream of a happy ending for Boston’s Big 3 was over.
Danny Ainge blew up the team after a 4-2 series loss to the New York Knicks in the first round of the 2013 playoffs and traded fan favorites Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett to the Brooklyn Nets. While we know better now, many NBA fans at the time thought Boston had been fleeced. They traded two Celtics greats for a hodgepodge of players — at least one of which who didn’t even want to play in Boston — and a handful of draft picks that few thought would become valuable since the Nets had a 29-year-old Deron Williams and 25-year-old Brook Lopez to steer them into the future.
That rumored Celtics-Nets trade is so bad for Boston that Doc Rivers just quit on the Celtics again.
— Bill Simmons (@BillSimmons) June 27, 2013
Nevertheless, the picks turned out to be valuable and the Celtics only struggled for a few years before topping the East once again in 2016-17 under new head coach Brad Stevens. Isaiah Thomas led a valiant charge through the first two rounds, highlighted by a memorable a 53-point explosion in Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Semifinals against the Washington Wizards the day after the death of his sister. However, Thomas’ hip gave out two games into the ECF, and Boston’s season once again came to an end at the hands of Lebron.
That summer, Ainge traded Thomas for Kyrie Irving, signed Gordon Hayward in free agency, and drafted Jayson Tatum with one of the picks conveyed in the Pierce/KG deal with Brooklyn. Despite the discomfort of parting with Thomas, the Celtics were now equipped with a pair of proven stars in Irving and Hayward, a star role player in Al Horford, impressive depth in Marcus Morris and Terry Rozier, and an exciting young core of Tatum, Jaylen Brown and Marcus Smart. Going into the season, they had the third-best odds to win it all, only behind the Golden State Warriors — who now had Kevin Durant — and LeBron’s Cavaliers. Those odds came crashing down only 5 minutes into the regular season, when Hayward broke his ankle coming down from an alley-oop attempt.
However, the team still finished with 55 wins, good enough for second place in the East, and made it to the 2018 ECF without Kyrie, who missed the playoffs due to season-ending surgery. The youngsters even led the team to a 3-2 lead over the Cavs, sparking fanciful hopes that a rookie JT and sophomore JB could topple LeBron’s longstanding reign and bring about a new era in the East. Nope. LeBron put up a monstrous 46-point performance in Game 6 to tie the series, then brought Cleveland back from a halftime deficit in Game 7 to win the series.
After the Kyrie era…
