Books: "The Boston Globe Story of the Celtics" By Chad Finn

 

The Boston Globe Story of the Celtics: 1946-Present: The Inside Stories and Acclaimed Reporting on the NBA's Banner Franchise

By Chad Finn

Black Dog & Leventhal; hardcover, 464 pages; $32.00

The NBA season is upon us, and like many times before, the Boston Celtics are the defending champions. It was their league-leading 18th championship, and first since 2008, and like all their ones before, Boston's landmark newspaper was there to chronicle it.

The wonderful new book, The Boston Globe Story of the Celtics: 1946-Present: The Inside Stories and Acclaimed Reporting on the NBA's Banner Franchise, is a collection of articles and features from one of the best sportswriting teams in the country, from the team's inception to this past June's championship.

It all started with founder Walter A. Brown's faith in his fledgling team, one of the NBA's charter members. Those stories on the early days of the league are particularly fascinating, considering that the Celtics and the Knicks are the only two original teams that survived or are still in their home city.

The Celtics were originally part of the Basketball Association of America (BBA) in 1946, which was based in the East, and it merged three years later with the National Basketball League, which was centered in the Midwest. As Bob Ryan pointed out in 1991, "The BAA came into being for one basic reason: the men who operated arenas housing National Hockey League teams were looking for an attraction to put fannies in their building when the hockey team was on the road. Walter A. Brown was one such hockey man. The president of the Bruins knew less than nothing about basketball, and no one was clamoring for a professional team."

What soon followed was an unmatched run of dominance, as the Celtics won 11 championships from 1957 to 1969, with Head Coach Red Auerbach, and a team led by Bill Russell, Bob Cousy, and Tom Heinsohn, who late became a beloved announcer for the team.

The Celtics kept the momentum going into the 1970s, as they won a couple more championships, but just as it began to wane, the Celtics drafted Larry Bird in 1978, a moment in which Bob Ryan wrote, "Red Auerbach did not look as if he had swallowed the canary. He looked as if he had just consumed the entire aviary." 

Ryan also compared its impact to when the team drafted Russell 22 years earlier, and he was proven right, as Bird led the Celtics to three more championships in the 1980s. That era was marked by the rivalry with the Los Angeles Lakers, whom they met three times in The Finals, with Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabaar and Co. taking two of them.

In addition to Ryan, some of the other writers from this renowned sports page you will encounter include Dan Shaughnessy, Jackie MacMullan, Leigh Montville, Baxter Holmes, Gary Washburn, and Adam Himmelsbach.

The Celtics then went through some lean years, marked by tragedy, and it wouldn't be until 2007, when they paired their stalwart, Paul Pierce, with Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett and vanquished the Lakers to break a 22-year drought and capture banner No. 17.

Two years later, the Lakers got their revenge, holding the Celtics off in a seven-game classic. In the decade that followed, the Celtics rebuilt their core, and would finally make it back to The Finals in 2022, but they ran into the dynastic Golden State Warriors.

The Celtics would finish the job last spring, with one of the most dominant postseason runs of all time, left by Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, and a prolific offense that steamrolled the Dallas Mavericks in five games to capture their 18th championship.

In this excerpt, Finn writes of what has set the Celtics apart: "The Celtics' guiding principles, instituted by Auerbach upon his hiring in 1950 and buttressed by Russell's unselfish, defense-oriented approach, is that the team comes before the individual, and winning comes above all. But winning players win games, and during their first four decades, the Celtics had the greatest continuous run of superstars any team has had in the sport's annals. It began with Bob Cousy, the ballhandling whiz from Holy Cross who was the franchise's first gate attraction. Then came the magnificent Russell, the foil to perceived Goliath Wilt Chamberlain, who won more and did more to help his teams win than any player before or since while also emerging as a champion of social justice  away from the court. Tommy Heinsohn was a franchise institution as a player, coach, and beloved broadcaster, while bank shot-shooting Sam Jones may be the most underrated superstar in Celtics lore.

Havlicek began his career as a continuation of the franchise's sixth-man tradition that started with Frank Ramsey and ended it as the Celtics' all-time leading scorer. Bird's arrival came a gap year after Havlicek's retirement, and in his 13 seasons - and we say this with apologies to Air Jordan in Chicago and Magic and Kobe in Los Angeles - he became as beloved as any player has been in any single market. After some bleak time brought on by tragedy - the deaths of Len Bias in 1986 and captain Reggie Lewis in 1993 - the Celtics found their next cornerstone a half-decade after Bird's retirement when Paul Pierce slipped inexplicably to No. 10 in the 1998 draft. Not even Rick Pitino could mess that up. All in all, the Celtics have retired 24 numbers - well, 23, since Jim Loscutoff, a sharp-elbowed role player on seven championship teams, asked that his nickname, 'Loscy,' hang from the rafters rather than his uniform digits.

What sweetened the success even more were the rivalries, both individual and team. Chamberlain, who played for the Philadelphia Warriors, Sixers, and then Los Angeles Lakers, was the most physically dominating player the league had seen, particularly in comparison with his peers, scoring 100 points in a game in 1962 and averaging an astounding 50.1 that season. But Chamberlain's teams beat Russell's just once in eight playoff encounters.

While the Celtics engaged in a stirring rivalry with the Philadelphia 76ers, particularly in the early '80s, their history is intertwined with that of the Lakers. The Celtics and Lakers met in the Finals eight times in the Russell era, and Boston won all eight meetings. The '80s brought more balance, when Bird and Magic, on opposite coasts with two different but spectacular teams, carried over their rivalry from their college days, elevating and perhaps even saving the NBA in the process. The Lakers won five titles in the '80s to the Celtics' three, Los Angeles winning two of three head-to-head Finals showdowns. The franchises met again in 2008, when the Celtics won their first title in 22 years, and in 2010, when the Lakers prevailed.

The Lakers-Celtics rivalry, particularly the Bird-Magic years, was the aesthetic pinnacle of professional basketball: as good as it got and as good as it could ever be."