Ranking Boston’s quartet of stars vs. previous NBA champs: Are the Celtics the best ever?

These Boston Celtics have a tendency to break our basketball brains.

Going into the season, they were the best team in the league on paper, and they took care of business during the regular season with the co-best net rating of any NBA team since the 1996-97 Chicago Bulls while going 64-18. And yet, Boston has had plenty of doubters throughout its playoff run, including during the lead-up to its Finals matchup with the Dallas Mavericks.

The Celtics lead 3-1 going into Game 5 at home on Monday (8:30 p.m. ET on ABC), but even that comes on the heels of a near-record blowout loss in Game 4, dropping their point differential in the Finals to minus-6. As always, the Celtics exist to confuse us.

So why can’t we ever fully wrap our minds around this Celtics team? One of the biggest reasons might be that it looks different from the way other potential champions are typically constructed.

Contrary to what Dallas coach Jason Kidd said after Game 1 of the Finals, Jayson Tatum has been Boston’s best player by Estimated RAPTOR Wins Above Replacement during the playoffs, accumulating 2.4 WAR in 18 postseason games. But Kidd was onto something when he posited that someone other than Tatum might still at least plausibly be the top Celtic — whether that be Jaylen Brown, or someone else. In this Finals, a different player led the team in scoring in each of its wins (Brown in Game 1, Jrue Holiday in Game 2 and Tatum in Game 3), while Derrick White scored at least 15 in all three of those games.

In other words, when it is clicking (like in Games 1 through 3), Boston is about an ensemble of stars rather than a singular superstar. If we compare the 2024 Celtics to every NBA champion since the 1976 ABA merger on the basis of playoff WAR per team game from their top player, Tatum and Boston would rank fifth lowest out of the 36 champs since 1977, despite potentially having one of the highest playoff net ratings of any champion in that span if they can close out the Mavs.

But a better way of understanding these Celtics is to grade their depth instead.

With that in mind, let’s run through where Boston’s top foursome of Tatum, Brown, White and Holiday would rank relative to the top four in playoff WAR per game on NBA champs since the merger, if they win. (With apologies to Kristaps Porzingis, who has only played six of Boston’s 17 games this postseason and will probably miss the rest of the Finals with a leg injury.)

We’ll also do it based on how good each team’s fourth-best player was — emphasizing how special it is to build a quartet of stars who can do so many different things

Kobe and Shaq rightly got much of the credit for leading what was, by net rating, the greatest playoff run in modern NBA history. But it gets forgotten just how good Derek Fisher and Rick Fox were during that postseason run as well. Fisher made 2.2 3s per game at an astonishing 51.5% 3-point percentage throughout the entire playoffs, playing the all-important role of spot-up shooter within Phil Jackson’s triangle offense. And Fox was an early prototype 3-and-D wing who helped Bryant cover opponents’ best scorers on the perimeter while being a threat to knock down shots at the other end.

Along with O’Neal’s utter dominance inside against even the toughest interior foes (33 PPG and 16 RPG against Hall of Famer Dikembe Mutombo in the Finals), the depth of these Lakers made them arguably the greatest team of all time.

Detroit would be tough to beat if we were looking at top fives, as this roster also included Rasheed Wallace at power forward. As it stands, the 2004 Pistons are still an ensemble that can challenge the 2024 Celtics — or anyone else — on depth.

Wallace was the team’s top producer on the basis of his stellar defense and perhaps an underrated effect on the offense (Detroit’s scoring efficiency was 18 points/100 better with him than without), while the rest of this top four embodied the type of all-around two-way excellence and clutch dependability that defined Detroit’s march through the Eastern Conference and win against the Lakers in the Finals. That victory was considered a huge upset at the time, but perhaps it shouldn’t have been based on the Pistons’ superior depth and regular-season net rating.

By playoff net rating, this was the second-best Lakers team of the Showtime era, trailing only the 1987 version that went 11-1 through the West and beat the Celtics in a six-game Finals showdown (more on them later). This edition had an 11-2 record in the West before beating Boston in six games, but it was deeper in terms of the performance L.A. got from the back end of its core four.

James Worthy was in his third NBA season and Byron Scott in his second, but each provided strong support to the megastar duo of Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Worthy was a close second behind a still-in-his-prime Abdul-Jabbar in playoff scoring ( 21.5 PPG), and he did it with impressive efficiency (64.6 TS%), while Scott shot 47.6% from 3-point range and scored 16.9 PPG to solidify his breakout season.

This year’s core are a testament to the power of roster construction and strong coaching. When they’re at their best, every player in Boston’s top four can assume the role of scorer, shooter or passer, depending on what the defense presents and what the team needs at that moment. And on defense, all four can guard multiple positions while also disrupting opponents in help situations. It doesn’t matter that Tatum — statistically the best overall player on the team — is shooting 29% in the clutch during the playoffs, because Brown, White and Holiday are shooting 58% in those situations.

One key lesson of this team is that your top player doesn’t need to be your closer. Another is that a championship-caliber quartet can come together on the fly; while Boston drafted Brown and Tatum consecutively in 2016 and 2017, it acquired White at the 2022 trade deadline and added Holiday in October.

Along with the 2004 Pistons, the 2011 Mavs are another champion who will always go down as having maximized the full potential of their roster at the right time. En route to an upset of the star-studded Miami Heat in the Finals, Dallas leaned heavily on future Hall of Famer Dirk Nowitzki (who won Finals MVP with 26.0 PPG and 9.7 RPG in the series), but also on a supporting cast featuring Jason Terry as a secondary scorer, Kidd as a shooter and distributor, Tyson Chandler as a super-efficient rim-protecting big, and — if we expanded beyond our top four — other key contributors such as J.J. Barea and Shawn Marion.

Every member of this team played their role to near perfection during the 2011 playoffs.

Another, separate iteration of Kobe’s Lakers on our list, this version boasted as good a headline quartet from top to bottom as any in recent memory. Complementing Bryant and Pau Gasol’s two-man game, Lamar Odom was at his underrated peak as an excellent jack-of-all-trades who could score, shoot (he made 51.4% of his 3s in the playoffs), pass, rebound and defend at a high level.

Meanwhile, 23-year-old Trevor Ariza shot 47.6% from deep and proved to be one of the game’s quintessential 3-and-D wings, just as that role was gaining prominence. Blending classic gunslinger ball with versatile bigs and wings, the 2009 Lakers were a perfect mix of old and new basketball sensibilities.

It’s no surprise to see these guys rank highly on a list that rewards unselfish, deep teams. As I wrote previously when comparing the 2024 Celtics to the 2014 Spurs, that team has a good case for playing the most beautiful and efficient team basketball we’ve ever seen. And in order to play that way, you need a long list of strong contributors. In retrospect, Kawhi Leonard was just coming into his own as a superstar, but San Antonio was also buoyed by the ageless two-way genius of Tim Duncan and Manu Ginóbili, plus the shooting (47.5 3P%) and defense of Danny Green on the wing.

Again, much like the current Celtics, this Spurs team was nearly impossible to stop when they got on a roll.

We won’t belabor things by going back over the big names that carried over for L.A. between 2001 and 2002, except to say that Shaq was even more statistically impactful during the latter playoff run — the Lakers’ net rating was an incredible 22.9 points/100 better with the Big Diesel on the floor than off — and that Robert Horry had one of the best playoff performances in a career jam-packed with them. This was the postseason that saw him drive a stake through the heart of the rival Sacramento Kings with that famous buzzer-beating, game-winning 3.

Anybody on this team could be a game-changer when given the opportunity.

Where would a list of deep championship starring casts be without the Bad Boy Pistons? Led by the indomitable spirit of 6-foot-1 lead guard Isiah Thomas, who bounced back from the sprained ankle that hobbled him in the 1988 Finals to get his revenge in the 1989 playoffs, the Pistons used a balanced attack and hard-nosed defensive tactics — like the eponymous “Rules” they played on Michael Jordan in the East finals — to pound the opposition.

In a Finals rematch against L.A., Detroit swept the favored Lakers, with their fourth-best WAR player Joe Dumars scoring 27.3 PPG and earning Finals MVP honors. Along with their 1990 championship follow-up, these Pistons rode a roster overflowing with fierce defenders (we didn’t even mention Dennis Rodman!) to the short list of best defensive title winners in modern history.

Another case of a similar team to another already on our list, the 1987 Lakers got less out of Abdul-Jabbar, who had started to decline some — and to be clear, only some — from his MVP-candidate peak of a few years earlier. But Worthy was more of a star, so L.A. didn’t miss a beat, posting the fifth-best postseason net rating of any team since the merger (just ahead of the 2024 Celtics).

The most fascinating new name to crack the top four in WAR was shooting guard Michael Cooper, who was primarily known for his suffocating perimeter defense — he was named NBA Defensive Player of the Year in 1987 — but who also shot 48.6% from 3-point range in the 1987 postseason, including a scorching 14-for-23 (60.9%) performance in the Finals against the rival Celtics. His six made 3s in Game 2 would be a Finals record until it was broken by Kenny Smith in 1995.

And for the those who want to see how the rest of the teams, ranked by their top players’ playoff WAR, stack up: