Garden Party: Celtics wash away recent failures by winning 18th NBA championship

For bookkeeping purposes, the Boston Celtics secured their 18th NBA championship on June 17, 2024, at TD Garden. Drama? Well, no, there wasn’t much in the way of heart-pounding stuff, the Celtics closing out a breezy 106-88 victory over the Dallas Mavericks in Game 5 of the NBA Finals, with Boston’s vaunted J’s — Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown — combining for 52 points.

How one-sided was the series? How one-sided was Boston’s entire postseason run? As one-sided as the regular season, during which the Celtics went a league-best 64-18. The Celtics then roared right through the playoffs, their dominance such that hoop historians will little note nor long remember there was a surprising and embarrassing and just a tad concerning 122-84 loss to the Mavericks in Game 4 of the NBA Finals — thereby denying Boston a four-game sweep and, naturally, resurrecting an argument that gets dusted off whenever these things happen.

Might this become the first team in NBA history to lose a playoff series after going up 3-0?

Nope. The Celtics made short work of every team they faced in the postseason. In fact, from Game 1 of the Eastern Conference quarterfinals right through their championship-clinching victory over the Mavericks, the Celtics were a combined 16-3 against the Miami Heat, Cleveland Cavaliers, Indiana Pacers and Mavericks.

They took out the Miami Heat in the first round, Brown and Derrick White each scoring 25 points in a 118-84 Game 5 victory. Next up were the Cleveland Cavaliers, and, they too were dismissed in five games. The clincher: Celtics 113, Cavs 98, with a game-high 25 points from Tatum and, for those who love role players, a sneaky 11 points in 21 minutes from Payton Pritchard.

The Eastern Conference finals against Indiana turned out to be little more than a limbering-up exercise for the NBA Finals with series MVP Jaylen Brown leading the Celtics to a sweep.

On to the NBA Finals. Win. Win. Win. Eyebrow-raising 112-84 loss in Game 4.

And then, on June 17, 2024, an all-the-live-long-night Garden party against the Mavericks secured the Celtics’ first championship since 2008. For added historical heft, the victory added another championship trophy to the Boston sports market’s overflowing 21st-century trophy case. Boston’s Big Four pro sports franchises have now won 13 championships this century — six by the New England Patriots, four by the Red Sox, two by the Celtics and one by the Bruins.

So, yes, June 17, 2024. That’s the date to jot down in your Celtic scrapbook. That’s when it became official. But let’s take a step back from the jet-propelled confetti that turned the Garden into a white haze. Let’s take a whole lot of steps back, to about one year earlier — to June 29, 2023. It was just over a month after the Celtics had been blown out in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference finals by Miami, and two-and-a-half weeks after the Heat had been shown the door by the Denver Nuggets in Game 5 of the NBA Finals.

June 29, 2023. It was on that day, at the Auerbach Center, the practice facility where the Celtics do their real work, that a news conference was held to introduce the newest member of the team, 7-foot-2 center Kristaps Porziņģis. The deal had been consummated a week earlier with Celtics president of basketball operations Brad Stevens engineering a three-team deal that notably landed popular longtime Celtics player Marcus Smart with the Memphis Grizzlies. But don’t for one second believe the June 29, 2023, news conference was just a photo opp, even if Porziņģis did stand there holding up his crisp, new No. 8 Celtics jersey for about as long as he averaged per game with the 2022-23 Washington Wizards: 32.6 minutes.

The mere presence of Porziņģis, wearing that jersey in front of those cameras, made it possible for Celtics fans to see, and to believe in a for-real Big Three (Porziņģis, Tatum, Brown), something that had not been in evidence since the days of Paul Pierce, Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett. But two other important things happened that day:

• Stevens didn’t grab a bullhorn to make the point, but he told reporters that the roster is “a work in progress,” and that “there are more moves to make.” In other words, if Stevens was to be believed, there’d be more than standard offseason roster tweaking going on between the Porziņģis photo opp and the Celtics’ October 25 season opener against the New York Knicks. Sure enough, this happened on Oct. 1: In exchange for guard Malcolm Brogdon, center Robert Williams and a pair of first-round draft picks, Stevens acquired guard Jrue Holiday from the Portland Trail Blazers, which just days earlier had acquired him from the Milwaukee Bucks. It was a bold move at the time; with the benefit of history, though, we can now proclaim that Holiday and White formed a dynamic backcourt that “completed” the Celtics. Stevens, then, wasn’t kidding on that June day when he said there were “more moves to make.”

• Something else happened on June 29, 2023, that’s important, even if it happened off to the side while Porziņģis was trying on the new threads and smiling for the cameras. Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla held an informal breakaway session with a collection of the team’s writers, the idea being it would last for a few minutes and then everyone would go home. About five minutes into this little coffee klatch, a Celtics media relations operative informed the writers the next question would be the last. That’s when Mazzulla, who doesn’t have a shoe contract but was perfectly comfortable in whatever shoes he was wearing that day, said, “We’ve got time,” and kept answering questions until there were no more questions to be asked. The “interim” tag had long since been removed from Mazzulla’s business card, but in the eyes of many concerned Celtics followers, the uncertainty seemed to be lingering. Now, as he showed a willingness to hang around, to gab, to chill, Mazzulla was signaling these were his Celtics.

And so it was for Mazzulla during the 2023-24 season. Unburdened by the past, he guided the Celtics as though there had not been a lot of close-but-no-victory-cigar finishes in recent years. Remember, the Celtics had been looked upon as championship contenders as far back as the 2017-18 season when the then-19-year-old Tatum arrived in the NBA. And with second-year man Brown, Boston had a tandem that was young, talented and going places.

There was plenty of success, but not the kind that inspires one of Boston’s familiar “rolling rallies” through the streets of the Back Bay. Before 2023-24, three of the Tatum-Brown seasons ended with losses in the Eastern Conference finals. The 2021-22 season ended with a Game 6 loss to the Golden State Warriors in the NBA Finals.

And as Celtics resident historian Tatum will tell you, “Everybody knows we only hang up championship banners.”

And so this season ended on June 17, 2024. It ended with confetti, hugs and a trophy presentation. And a call to Banners “R” Us to get going on No. 18.

But it began inside a practice gym in Brighton, the day Kristaps Porziņģis smiled for the cameras … the day Brad Stevens said “there are more moves to make” … the day Joe Mazzulla began to walk the walk and talk the talk of a veteran NBA coach.

This essay is the introduction to “Garden Party: Inside the Boston Celtics’ Run to the 2023-24 NBA Championship” The Athletic’s commemorative book about the Celtics’ 2023-24 season. Order a copy today for $39.95, plus shipping and tax. Books will ship on August 2, 2024.

(Photo: Charles Krupa / Associated Press)