Boston Celtics
Boston Celtics, American professional basketball team based in Boston, Massachusetts. One of the most successful franchises in sports history, the Celtics won 11 of 13 National Basketball Association (NBA) championships from 1957 to 1969. Overall, they have won 18 NBA titles.
Founded in Boston in 1946 by Walter Brown, the Celtics were charter members of the Basketball Association of America, a forerunner of the NBA (established in 1949). At the time of the team’s founding, Brown also managed the Boston Garden, on whose distinctive parquet court the green-and-white-clad Celtics thrived until the franchise moved to a new arena, now known as TD Garden, in 1995–96. The team posted a losing record in each of its first four seasons, which prompted the hiring of head coach Red Auerbach in 1950.
The Celtics’ run as a sports dynasty began in the mid-1950s under Auerbach, who later served as the team’s general manager and president. The team won its first title in the 1956–57 season after defeating the St. Louis Hawks in a closely contested final series, which included a double-overtime deciding seventh game. With a lineup of future Hall of Famers that included Frank Ramsey, Ed Macauley, Bill Sharman, ball-handling wizard Bob Cousy, Tom Heinsohn, dominating center Bill Russell (five times the league’s Most Valuable Player), and later Sam Jones, K.C. Jones, and John Havlicek, the “Celts” won eight consecutive NBA titles between 1958–59 and 1965–66—a record for the four major North American team sports—and triumphed again in 1967–68 and 1968–69.
Boston’s ascent coincided with the postwar proliferation of television sets in the United States, helping the team and its players become iconic figures as the sport’s national profile grew. Among the highlights of the Celtics’ unprecedented championship run are Russell twice gathering an NBA finals-record 40 rebounds in a game (1960, 1962) and Havlicek’s series-clinching steal of an inbounds pass in game seven of the 1965 Eastern Division finals, which elicited the famous call of “Havlicek stole the ball!” by announcer Johnny Most. The matchups between Russell, who served as the Celtics’ player-coach from 1966 to 1969 and Wilt Chamberlain, first as a Philadelphia 76er and then with the Los Angeles Lakers, were at the center of some of the most dramatic games in NBA playoff history.
Havlicek was still a key contributor, along with Dave Cowens, Paul Silas, and Jo Jo White, on teams coached by Heinsohn that won titles in 1973–74 and 1975–76. The second of those championships included a dramatic triple-overtime victory over the Phoenix Suns in game five of the finals. In 1978 the Celtics were involved in an unusual transaction after the NBA blocked the team’s owner, Irv Levin, from moving the franchise to his native California. Instead, Levin and John Y. Brown, owner of the Buffalo Braves, traded franchises. That same year Boston acquired one of the greatest players in league history—and arguably the most beloved Celtic of all time—when they selected sharpshooting forward Larry Bird in the NBA draft.
The NBA reached new levels of popularity with the excitement generated by the supremacy battle between the Lakers led by Magic Johnson and a Celtics team led by Bird (who had a rivalry with Johnson dating back to their college days), Robert Parish, Kevin McHale, and Dennis Johnson that advanced to the NBA finals five times in the 1980s and won championships in 1980–81, 1983–84, and 1985–86.
In the mid-1990s the Celtics experienced the first prolonged playoff drought in the franchise’s history—six straight years beginning with the 1995–96 season. When the Celtics returned to the postseason, they often lost in the early rounds. This changed during the 2007–08 season when, under head coach Doc Rivers, the Celtics made the greatest single-season turnaround in NBA history, finishing with the league’s best record and posting a 42-win improvement after the offseason addition of superstars Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen to a team that already included perennial All-Star Paul Pierce. They advanced to the NBA finals, where they defeated the rival Lakers for a ninth time and won the 17th title in franchise history. The two franchises again won their respective conference championships and faced off for the NBA title in the 2009–10 season, with the Lakers winning the championship in seven games.
As the Celtics’ veteran roster grew older, the team had reduced on-court success. Allen left in free agency in 2012, and the team traded away Garnett and Pierce after the 2012–13 campaign in an effort to spur a rebuilding process centered on younger players. That effort bore fruit much faster than many observers expected, as the Celtics returned to the playoffs in 2014–15. The team added point guard Isaiah Thomas during that season, and he proceeded to blossom into an All-Star, leading the team to the best record in the Eastern Conference in 2016–17. The team’s season ended in the conference finals after the Celtics lost four games to one to the Cleveland Cavaliers. The Celtics traded Thomas and other assets for star guard Kyrie Irving in the offseason and also signed All-Star forward Gordon Hayward. Both players were limited by significant injuries during the regular season, but the remaining young Celtics core outperformed expectations, leading Boston to the second best record in the Eastern Conference and on an unexpectedly long playoff run that ended in a seven-game conference finals loss to the Cavaliers.
Boston remained relatively healthy over the course of the 2018–19 season, but the team was handily eliminated from the playoffs in the second round. The team—now headlined by the duo of Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown—returned to the conference finals during the COVID-19-shortened 2019–20 season but followed that with another first-round playoff exit in 2020–21, which led the Celtics to make changes to their front-office and coaching staffs. After a slow start to the 2021–22 campaign, Boston got hot and then posted the best record in the league from early January through the end of the season, which the team followed with a dogged playoff run that ultimately ended in a six-game loss to the Golden State Warriors in the NBA finals.
Another coaching change was made in the offseason, and the team entered the 2022–23 season under the leadership of 34-year-old Joe Mazzulla, the youngest head coach in the league. The Celtics thrived, besting their previous season record to finish 57–25. In the playoffs, they made it to the Eastern Conference finals, where they went down 0–3 against the Miami Heat before coming back to force a game seven at home, which they lost. Boston recovered from that disappointing finish with a dominating performance in 2023–24. They lost just 18 games in the regular season and 3 in the playoffs en route to winning their 18th NBA title.