The Boston Celtics will take the floor at TD Garden on Thursday with an NBA-record 18th NBA Finals championship in their sights, a resounding 64 regular season wins (seven more than the next closest team) and a dominant 12-2 record in this year’s postseason bracket.
That momentum ensures the Celtics will have an abundance of confidence when they take on the Dallas Mavericks. Boston will also shoulder the burden of intense pressure. After losing to the Golden State Warriors in the 2021-22 Finals, Boston is back to finish its pursuit of a championship and will be feeling the heat to cap off its dominant season with new hardware in its most promising — and high-stakes — opportunity yet.
The roots of the Celtics’ core extends back to the start of the Brad Stevens era in the early 2010s. Boston ignited a rebuild by trading away stars Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce, two of the members of the Celtics’ 2007-08 Big Three (my first favorite NBA team), and sunk to the bottom of the Eastern Conference. Just a year later, the Celtics were back in the playoffs, and they progressed toward an NBA Finals berth each of the next four seasons:
2014-15: Reached first round, lost to the Cleveland Cavaliers 4-0
2015-16: Reached first round, lost to the Atlanta Hawks 4-2
2016-17: Reached Eastern Conference finals, lost to the Cleveland Cavaliers 4-1
2017-18: Reached Eastern Conference finals, lost to the Cleveland Cavaliers 4-3
Returning to those heights proved challenging for Stevens’ Celtics and Boston’s duo of top draft picks, Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown. The next three seasons all ended in disappointment, culminating in Stevens’ pivot to the front office and Ime Udoka’s hiring:
2018-19: Reached Eastern Conference semifinals, lost to the Milwaukee Bucks 4-1
2019-20: Reached Eastern Conference finals, lost to the Miami Heat 4-2
2020-21: Reached first round, lost to the Brooklyn Nets 4-1
Over the past three seasons, Boston has established itself as the dominant force in the East. Milwaukee and Miami survived the East playoffs and represented the conference in the NBA Finals in two of the past three seasons, but the Celtics have owned the conference’s top seed each of the past three years, under Udoka in 2021-22 and Joe Mazzulla the past two years.
All this to say — there’s no excuse left for the Celtics to come up short. Tatum and Brown are firmly in their primes, and offseason additions Kristaps Porzingis and Jrue Holiday have put aside their star status and fit in well with Boston’s culture. Porzingis should be healthy come time for Game 1, while Holiday has traded in the high usage and volume of his recent playoff runs in Milwaukee for greater efficiency and a playoff career-low 1.6 turnovers per game. Quality role players like point guard Derrick White and Al Horford have proven valuable as well.
The Celtics are experienced, relatively healthy and with momentum on their side. Unless Boston makes a crazy trade in the coming seasons for another superstar, it is very unlikely that the Celtics will have a better shot at an 18th title than they have this June.
The underdog Mavericks aren’t exactly a young up-and-comer, but even reaching the Finals is a pleasant surprise that Dallas can use to kick off its seasons of contention with MVP finalist Luka Doncic. With the 25-year-old Doncic as their point guard for the foreseeable future, the Mavericks both have a win-now mentality and a long runway to contend, as long as they surround him with complimentary pieces. The roster’s current production has accomplished just that, with NBA champion Kyrie Irving by Doncic’s side in the backcourt and promising young players in supporting roles that amount to a team whose play has exceeded its hype.
The Celtics, coming off nine consecutive playoff failures, have no such honeymoon period.
The playoff resumes for Boston and Dallas provide an even starker contrast. While Boston’s romp through the Eastern Conference has been dominant but lacking in quality competition, Dallas won its three Western Conference playoff series as the lower-seeded teams and upset superstars like Los Angeles’ Kawhi Leonard, Oklahoma City’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Minnesota’s Anthony Edwards in consecutive rounds. Their 4-1 series rout of Minnesota was their most convincing victory of the season, a dismantling of the team that had outlasted the reigning NBA champion Denver Nuggets and a coronation of Doncic as a top-three player in today’s NBA.
Doncic and Dallas are heading into the Finals fully intent on capturing the title. But if the Mavericks fall short of their second NBA Finals in franchise history, the season will still be a major success after one of the most impressive playoff runs in recent memory. There is a possible playoff matchup sequence from this year that could be more difficult than the Clippers, West No. 1 seed Thunder, Timberwolves and East No. 1 seed Celtics, and yet the Mavericks have made each victory appear more convincing than the last.
On the other side, it feels like the Celtics have yet to make a statement this postseason. Boston dispatched the eight-seeded Miami Heat, who were without their best player in Jimmy Butler, in the first round, then knocked off the fourth-seeded Cleveland Cavaliers (who fired their head coach shortly afterward) and swept the sixth-seeded Indiana Pacers. Boston took care of business by winning 12 of its 14 games and putting the series out of reach shortly after they started, but a failure in the Finals would render that stretch of Eastern Conference dominance obsolete in the Celtics’ 2023-24 postmortem.
The good news: the Mavericks are every bit the worthy opponent the Celtics need to validate their championship claim, and defeating Luka Doncic and ending the championship drought would establish Boston as one of the most dominant championship-winning teams of the 21st century.
In returning to the Finals, Boston has reached an inflection point in the Tatum-Brown saga — it’s time to determine whether the Celtics’ decade-long team-building exercise, which has included turning down serious bids at superstars around the league to keep the young core intact — is indeed a success.
The Celtics will feature prominently in championship contention for the next couple seasons and isn’t in championship-or-combust mode in a literal sense (though the recent declines of the Heat, Bucks, Lakers, Suns and Warriors are sobering outcomes among recent NBA Finals participants). In comparison to the Mavericks, though, Boston has more pressure to purify the stench of its playoff reputation. A ring would build Tatum’s case as a top-five player and postseason performer instead of simply a name on the regular season MVP ballot, while a title for Brown would validate Boston’s insistence on keeping him in town as Tatum’s running mate. For Stevens, who began the stretch of contention as the Celtics’ head coach and has evolved into its architect, a title would entrench his name in Celtics’ lore as one of the storied franchise’s front office legends.
Boston has a lot on the line, and viewers will find out soon if this is the Boston team that rises to the occasion or if the pressure, and the red-hot Mavericks, will prove too much to overcome.
Riker's Block 