The Boston Celtics were and are the NBA's Team of the Season
And they were just proven right, in the loudest way, for ignoring everyone on the outside who urged them to break up the duo of Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown
The Boston Celtics have believed it for a long time, for years and years and years, but now they can shout it to the world.
Never!
When you have a pair of two-way wings like Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, in a league that leans on elite wing men who excel at both ends harder than it is ever has, you never seriously think about breaking them up.
You absolutely, positively don't trade one of them away.
Brad Stevens took a different approach after Danny Ainge managed to outfox the competition and land Brown and Tatum with back-to-back No. 3 overall picks. The vindicated approach.
It took many more moves, multiple roster resets and weathering numerous playoff disappointments, but the Celtics' president of basketball operations who succeeded Ainge just kept acquiring guys who made this team almost untouchable this season. First Al Horford. Then Derrick White. Then Kristaps Porziņģis. Then Jrue Holiday.
The Two Jays finally got to the NBA mountaintop Monday night with that quartet of top-shelf chaperones and with Stevens — who also got it right when he responded to the Ime Udoka crisis by choosing Joe Mazzulla from the back to the bench to replace to replace him — expertly managing it all.
They went 64-18. They won the East by 14 games — most in either conference since Golden State won the West by 16 games way back in 1975-76. They finished 80-21 and held the high-powered Dallas Mavericks under 100 points four times in five NBA Finals games. The 2023-24 NBA playoffs were often a downer because of all the injuries up and down their conference, but don't expect the Celtics to apologize.
Not after all the championship-or-bust pressure that has been thrust into their faces since, oh, Oct. 1., when Stevens pilfered Holiday from Portland in a trade steal just hours before the start of training camp. Not after watching the Warriors dance all over TD Garden after clinching a fourth title in an eight-season span in Boston just two years ago. Not after losing the first three games of last season's Eastern Conference finals to Miami, winning the next three to force an improbable Game 7 and then losing that one at home, too.
"Coming up short and having failures makes this moment that much better," Tatum said. "You know what it feels like to be on the other side of this and be in the locker room and hearing the other team celebrate on your home floor. That was devastating."
The Jordan Brand commercial starring Tatum seconds after Boston's 106-88 Game 5 demolition of Dallas (which you can watch here) let you know he has heard every naysaying word:
Next up you're going to hear this question all day: Can the Celtics be the team that finally reminds us what it's like to see a repeat champion? The Celts, after all, are the league's sixth different champions across the past six seasons, which hasn't happened — as we've noted often over the past nine months — since the '74-75 Warriors tipped off the last such stretch of parity witnessed in the NBA.
Be advised, though, that these Celtics are set up to go back-to-back better than any team we've since the Warriors of Curry and Durant and Thompson and Green and Kerr last did so in 2016-17 and 2017-18.
Three key factors working in Boston's favor:
The Celtics will soon sign Tatum and White to extensions expected to approach nearly $450 million in value and, in Tatum and Brown alone, will give them two players who are owed a combined $600 million. Yet as longtime former Nets executive Bobby Marks, now of ESPN, often points out: The Celtics might prove to be the rare team that can thrive with a hugely expensive top-heavy roster in the NBA's most onerous luxury tax era yet that takes away so much of your flexibility when you spend big. The reason: Boston has so many future first-round picks stockpiled to offset the roster-building limitations faced by teams such as Phoenix, Minnesota, Milwaukee and the LA Clippers.
For as seemingly long as so many of us have been doubting them, Tatum is only 26 and Brown is 27.
Imagine how dangerous Tatum and Brown might be now when they are tapping into newfound we-can-win-it-all belief as opposed to that championship-or-bust, we-don't-trust-you angst. (And, no, you needn't expect Brown's coronation as Finals MVP over Tatum to create any sort of lasting animus — not if all that past playoff pain couldn’t divide them.)
"We heard it all," Brown said. "But we just blocked it out and kept going. I trusted him. He trusted me. And we did it together."
After going untrusted for so long, Tatum and Brown will surely want to savor this feeling for as long as possible without thinking about the future. That won't be easy in a league about to transition to the offseason faster than ever, thanks to the NBA's new rules that allow teams to talk new deals with their own free agents starting today, but The Jays' desire is understandable.
This is no slight to the Denver Nuggets, who showed similar faith and patience in the Nikola Jokić/Jamal Murray/Michael Malone triumvirate until those three overcame their own slew of playoff disappointments to finally come through last season, but tuning out the noise to stay the course is undeniably easier in the Rocky Mountains. Through no fault of its own, Denver is a market that routinely escapes the harshest NBA spotlight. No such grace is extended in Boston, where Tatum and Brown have absorbed the brunt of the disappointment for a fan base that — despite its league-leading 18 championship banners — has only reveled in only one in the 31 seasons since Larry Bird was last seen active in green in 1991-92.
Now Banner No. 18 will be hoisted in October and these Celtics, like this season's Nuggets, will be trusted like never before.
Remember what we wrote earlier in these playoffs after Denver lost the first two games at home to Minnesota in the second-round showdown that the defending champions ultimately lost in seven?
This is the way, right or wrong, it almost always works on Planet NBA:
We typically don't believe you can do it, really do it, until we actually see you do it on the grandest of stages.
Then we believe in you unreservedly ... and maybe too much.
Something tells me Tatum and Brown have never been as happy as they’re going to be when that new reality sinks in.
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Finals Predictions Results
We had nearly 100 respondents on June 1 when we made a community-wide call for NBA Finals predictions.
Only six of them, though, correctly predicted that the Celtics would win it all in precisely five games.
The most prescient prognosticators among us as tallied up by longtime subscriber Deven P:
(The less said about my Mavericks in 6 pick …)
Numbers Game
🏀 6/17
The 617-based Celtics have clinched their only two championships in the 21st century (2008 and 2024) on June 17th.
🏀 80-21
Only the 1985-86 Celtics (82-18) had a better record in franchise history, regular season and playoffs combined, than this season's 80-21 Celtics.
🏀 2015
Jaylen Brown is the NBA's first NBA Finals MVP since Golden State's Andre Iguodala in 2015 who did not make any of the three All-NBA teams in the same season.
🏀 2
Jrue Holiday is the first high-minute player to win a championship in his first season with two different teams (Milwaukee and Boston).
🏀 35
Joe Mazzulla is the youngest coach in league history to win it all (at just shy of age 36) since Bill Russell as the 35-year-old player/coach of the Celtics in 1969.
🏀 18
Maybe it was an omen for Banner No. 18: The Celtics won their first 18 games at home this season.
🏀 166
The Clippers' James Harden is the new leader for career playoff games played without winning a championship (166) after Boston managed to remove previous all-time leader Al Horford (186) from that list.
🏀 5
The Mavericks' Game 4 victory avoided the sixth Finals sweep of the NBA's 16-team playoff era dating to 1983-84. The five sweeps that did happen: 1989 (Pistons over Lakers), 1995 (Rockets over Magic), 2002 (Lakers over Nets), 2007 (Spurs over Cavaliers) and 2018 (Warriors over Cavaliers).
🏀 3,005
Dallas' Luka Doncic is one of just 11 players in league history to score more than 3,000 points in a season (3,005) when combining the regular season and playoffs.
🏀 10
Michael Jordan had 10 3,000-point seasons, according to The Associated Press' Tim Reynolds. Per Reynolds' research, Wilt Chamberlain had five such seasons and eight other players — Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Rick Barry, Elgin Baylor, Kobe Bryant, Kevin Durant, James Harden, Bob McAdoo and Shaquille O’Neal — each did it once.
🏀 2,999
In 2017-18, per Reynolds' research, LeBron James finished with exactly 2,999 points for Cleveland when combining the regular season and playoffs.
🏀 13
My colleague
collected 13 instant reactions — including mine — to the Celtics' championship. Check them out here:
🏀 5
Five days after I first wrote about the Clippers' strong interest in Jeff Van Gundy — which means the network ignored it and its readers' interests for five days — ESPN reported Tuesday morning that (surprise!) Jeff Van Gundy is leaving his special adviser role with the Celtics to join Tyronn Lue's coaching staff with the Clippers. The offseason is well and truly underway.
The Celts are deserving champions, for sure. I was surprised to not see Brad Stevens get any love in the podium ceremony, unless I missed it. What an ace job he's done on putting the final touches on this roster. I've liked him going back to his early Butler days and it's nice to see him succeed at this level.
Only 6 of guessed celts in 5, crazy!