His boxing videos were popular with the players, so Doc Rivers continued to show them to the Celtics between playoff games. A fan of the fight game, particularly of Muhammad Ali, the coach made sure that any montage he shared stuck to a similar theme.
He never showed the ones where Ali’s opponents seemed to be lulled by the promotional hype and rhymes. “The Greatest” would go into his familiar Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, his hand can’t hit what his eyes can’t see act, and some awestruck brawler would be psyched out before entering the ring.
Those weren’t the ones that spoke to Rivers. He was more of a Thrilla in Manila type. Ali versus Joe Frazier. A scheduled fifteen-round fight that went fourteen, a fight where the winner—Ali—said that it was the closest to death he’d come. He’d said that he wanted to quit, but Frazier’s corner conceded first.
Those fights were amazing. Rivers could use them to tease out lessons for each player, from the Big Three to the last man in. He could also use them as reminders for himself and Paul Pierce.
They’d seen a lot in their four Boston years together, and at times it was hard to imagine that they’d stand in the spotlight when it was over, with a referee holding up their fatigued arms in victory. They’d both had long conversations with Danny Ainge about leaving Boston. They’d both been picked apart, and often slammed, for their supposed lack of an essential thing.
Their relationship had swayed between similarities and extremes. Rivers pointed to their joint October birthday as an explanation for their occasional conflicts. Their birthday was also their annual signal for a remodeled Celtics roster. Starting when Rivers took the job in April 2004 to where he was in May 2008, just two players remained: Kendrick Perkins and Pierce.
Here they were now in a proud city whose residents understood the life of absorbing hits, literal and figurative. This was Detroit on a Friday evening, minutes before the start of game six of the conference finals. The Celtics, ahead 3–2 on the Pistons in the series, were just a win away from going to the NBA Finals.
So many new questions had been answered in the last two weeks. Even though the Celtics captured a game seven against LeBron in the previous round, they did it without winning a road game. Between Atlanta and Cleveland, they were 0–6. Could they win on the road? Yes. When they needed to.
They learned that about themselves when they were finally put in that position. They won the first game of the Detroit series only to lose the next one in Boston. The consequences immediately became stark: If they couldn’t win on the road, they couldn’t go to the NBA Finals. They went to Detroit, won game three, and regained control of the series.
This entire Boston-Detroit matchup was played before a backdrop of freakish connections to the past. Some of those connections went back four years. For others, it was twenty.
Kevin Garnett had a bond with Flip Saunders, the Pistons coach. Like KG, Saunders left Minnesota for a better situation in the Eastern Conference. He landed with veteran players who didn’t need to be taught to win because they’d already done that. His role was to steward them back to the finals. It was a good job but also a time-sensitive one. He had more wins during his three years in Detroit than he did during any three-year period in Minnesota, and no one in Detroit gave a damn about that. They wanted to taste more of the finals, where they’d been and Flip still hadn’t. This might be his last chance. Flip loved KG and vice versa, but this was the first time they’d be on the same playoff court knowing that if one of them advanced, the other would be left behind.
There was a generational element to the series as well. Boston and Detroit used to fight in the playoffs, seemingly every year, in the late 1980s. Two of the original Big Three—Larry Bird and Robert Parish—actually traded punches with Pistons center Bill Laimbeer. The Celtics won the conference in ’87, and the Pistons won the rematch in ’88. The Detroit win was significant because it was an official transfer of power. Boston had been to four consecutive NBA Finals, blocking Detroit and everyone else in the East. The win meant it was time for the Pistons to do what the Celtics did, winning two titles in four straight finals appearances.
In 2008, the inverse was forty-eight minutes away from being official. Boston had to get through Detroit, grind and wrestle and—there was no way around it—fight their way through Detroit until they could be considered the best of the East.
Rivers was always looking for an edge, and he thought he found one as he walked into the arena several hours before tip-off. He and Jeff Twiss, the Celtics’ longtime vice president of media services, saw it at the same time. Chauncey Billups, Rip Hamilton, and Tayshaun Prince walked out of general manager Joe Dumars’s office.
“This series is over,” Rivers said. “Three players coming out of the GM’s office and the head coach isn’t in there? That’s not good.”
Twiss smiled and said, “I hope you’re right, Boss.”
These proud Pistons may have been splintering a bit, but they were still going to make the Celtics scratch for it. Billups, perhaps the strongest point guard in the league, wore out young Rajon Rondo in the first half, scoring half of Detroit’s points. In the third quarter, Billups and Hamilton continued to push their teammates, and it appeared that yet another game seven showdown in Boston was inevitable.
Nothing went right.
Pierce made a 3 with a defender leaning and falling all over him, and the Boston bench celebrated, thinking that a possible 4-point play was seconds away. But official Bennett Salvatore saw something that no one in the building did—an offensive foul—and the Celtics walked away from the possession with nothing. Of course, the Pistons answered with a basket. It had become that type of game.
With ten minutes to play, Detroit led 70–60.
Rivers watched with his arms folded and began to instinctively nod. This was it. Right now. If they had it, now was the time to show it. They turned the next ninety seconds into their own biopic. It included the Big Three, but not exclusively, because that was the most accurate description of who they were.
Rondo made a floater. James Posey blocked a shot. Pierce got into the lane and found Perkins, who dunked and was fouled. KG went to post up and forced Rasheed Wallace to commit his fifth personal foul, a sequence that sent Wallace to the bench. As one camera followed Wallace, he threw a towel over it and yelled, “Get that fucking camera out of my face.”
Garnett made two free throws. The Pistons traveled. A Celtic exclaimed from the bench: “We gotta take this shit—it’s ours!” KG hit a turnaround. Perkins got a steal. Detroit went silent.
That 10-point lead was gone. The game was slipping away from Detroit, obviously, but the wise watchers of these things knew what this was. This was that power transfer. Teams are never ready to hand it over, even when their time is up, so they furiously grip it until someone hungrier and more talented rips it away.
It was happening. And quickly. A beautiful step-back jumper by Pierce, and due to the desperate situation, Wallace was back in the game… missing a layup. KG, at least eight inches taller than his buddy and old teammate Billups, shot over him and scored. A pull-up jumper by Rondo…
The Celtics were ecstatic, rising, and free. They could admit that now. The Big Three, and their thirty-two collective years of NBA experience, could exhale. They’d beaten themselves up at times, trying to understand why they’d never made the finals. Now that they were on their way there, they could appreciate that the self-doubt may have been one of their strengths. It made them all work harder.
“Yeah, baby,” Rivers said as he hugged Pierce. He gave him a glance that only the two of them could grasp. There were tears in that glance, but they’d be released later. Defiance had to come first.
“Hell yeah,” Pierce said, hugging back. They held each other for a few seconds, smiling about where they were going and where they had been. Pierce needed his coach to hear what he was saying, and how he was saying it.
“We did this, Coach,” Pierce said into his ear, hugging him again. “We did it. No one thought we’d be in this position.”
He wanted Rivers to know that he’d heard him during these four years together. He heard him that day Rivers told him to move the ball, and he heard the message of unselfishness on the duck boat.
They were their own team, eager to escape the shadows of Celtics history so they could solidify their own memories. Still, they had one more throwback to the 1980s before they walked out of the arena in suburban Detroit.
The Lakers had finished off the Spurs in the Western Conference Finals the night before, and so Pierce instigated a “Beat LA” chant in the locker room. It was ironic because Pierce, the LA kid, grew up loving the Lakers and hating the Celtics. He was also chanting for something that needed to be remastered and remixed from its 1982 origins.
Back then, “Beat LA” was a gracious Boston Garden crowd’s response to losing game seven of the conference finals. They hated the 76ers, for sure, but they hated the Western opponent—the Lakers—even more. They’d root for anyone to beat the Lakers.
The power of the 2008 Celtics was that “Beat LA” was a word of encouragement for them and from them. They knew they could say it and do it themselves. In 1982, the Sixers actually didn’t beat LA. They lost in six games and had to wait until the following season to beat the Lakers.
That wasn’t an option for these Celtics. They all felt as if they’d spent enough time dreaming and hoping and waiting. It was time to take on the Lakers and follow the instructions of the chant.
It may have been a function of playing in the East, but the Celtics’ NBA-best sixty-six wins didn’t position them as favorites against the Lakers. Nationally, Los Angeles was given extra credit for everything in its profile: the top seed in a tougher conference; league MVP Kobe Bryant; and head coach Phil Jackson, who already owned nine championship rings.
Danny Ainge thought it might have been the Atlanta series, too. The backstory didn’t matter to people who hadn’t watched the Celtics closely all year. They saw them pushed to a seventh game by the worst team in the playoffs.
Before the series started, Ainge asked Lakers assistant coach Tex Winter what scared him about the Celtics.
“I’m not sure Kobe can handle Ray Allen,” Winter answered.
No one, outside of the Lakers’ coaching staff, was thinking about some of the difficult matchups the Lakers faced against the Celtics. All discussion of Bryant was about his offense, not whom he would have to guard.
Every chance he got to speak with his players, Rivers found a way to download a few of his favorites. He praised Bryant and his 28 points per game just as he had praised LeBron and his 30. But he was quick to note that the Celtics’ strength was in their depth and trust. He never passed on a chance to say what he felt was obvious: We’re better than they are.
Whether with his players or staff, Rivers never wavered in his belief. “There’s no way the Lakers are tougher than us,” he said. “One game, maybe, because they have the ace of spades: Kobe. But in a seven-game series? There is no way physically that they can take the heat that we’re going to bring. Offensively, they’re pretty good. Defensively, they’re not a great defensive team, even though the numbers say they are. We should be able to get whatever we want on offense.”
In the opening half of Boston’s first finals game in twenty-one years, there was a nervousness and timidity to everyone in the building, even with players and coaches who had been on this stage before.
It might have been nerves that sent Pierce first to the floor midway through the third quarter and then, stunningly, into the arms of his teammates seconds later. It was a close game, with the Lakers ahead by 4. Pierce, in a cluster of players, went up for a rebound and had his right knee or ankle bumped by Kendrick Perkins.
Pierce screamed and then grabbed his knee. He thought a ligament had snapped, and although team doctors didn’t make any quick diagnoses, they told him to stay down. Seconds later he was in the arms of reserves Brian Scalabrine and Tony Allen, followed closely by a group of team employees and… a wheelchair. For Celtics’ fans, the circumstantial evidence was overwhelming. Pierce was grimacing in that wheelchair, pointing to his knee, as the group hurried him to the locker room. It was there on the ESPN cameras for all to see. Depressing.
Team trainer Eddie Lacerte quickly told Rivers that Pierce was out. This was not the situation for follow-up questions, so Lacerte and Rivers had a miscommunication. Rivers thought he meant Pierce was out for the season with a torn ACL. Lacerte meant that he was out for the game.
Neither was true.
The Garden crowd continued to watch the game and, now, their phones. Any updates on Pierce? Was this it? The Celtics had torn through the regular season, survived the Eastern playoffs, and been brought to the doorstep against the Lakers, only to lose Pierce?
It didn’t take long for the dire thoughts to be replaced by cynical ones. Just a few minutes of game time later, Pierce could be seen bouncing out of the tunnel, shouting and clapping his hands. This was the Pierce Revival Meeting. He had been scared, truly thinking he had torn something. His shouting and clapping was for that more than anything else.
The confusion was cleared up now: Rivers looked at Lacerte, Lacerte gave the coach a thumbs-up, and Brian McKeon, the team doctor, told Rivers that Pierce was structurally sound. There was a standing ovation from the crowd, back-to-back 3-pointers, a game one win, and some disbelief from the Lakers. One minute in the third quarter the guy is crumpled near the baseline. By the end of the third, he’d posted a 15-point quarter.
Rivers was asked about it after the game, and he answered all questions without awareness of one key detail: the wheelchair. He hadn’t seen it. When he was asked a question about Pierce’s theatrics, he thought it was a bizarre suggestion of Pierce faking an injury. Why would he do that? Once he got home and watched the game highlights, he finally saw it for the first time. So did Thibs, who called him.
“Can you believe it?” Thibs said, laughing. “I didn’t know that he was in a goddamn wheelchair!”
“I didn’t either,” Rivers said. “I didn’t even know we had a wheelchair. Where’d the wheelchair come from?”
They had to call Dr. McKeon and get him in on the laughs, too.
“Doc McKeon, where in the hell did the wheelchair come from?” Rivers prodded.
“We always have one back there. I’m telling you, I thought he tore his knee.”
It had gone from a humbling moment to a hilarious one. Once Rivers got the scope of everything that happened and how it looked to the Lakers on TV, he had to admit, “Yeah, that would have pissed me off, too.”
The story got a lot of attention in the two days off before game two. For the Celtics, relief. For the Lakers, more eye rolls.
Late in game two, the series took another turn that seemed strange at the time. The Celtics were crushing the Lakers with just seven minutes left in the game. The feeling-out phase was over, and now the teams were just playing ball. It wasn’t going well for the Lakers, down by 24.
The Celtics were going where they wanted, and doing what they wanted, all over the court. Rondo had been criticized several times during the postseason, but he was a hitmaker in game two. Each pass he threw found a hot hand, and he was stacking assists at video-game rates. Leon Powe sprung from the bench and attempted more free throws, thirteen, than all of the Lakers combined. He had 21 points in fifteen minutes of work. Pierce’s knee looked just fine; he was perfect on four 3-pointers and also had 8 assists.
What was there not to like with a 95–71 lead? It was a party. There was still nothing to worry about one minute later with the lead at 21. Or a minute later when it was 16.
Right?
Even after Bryant made a long 3 with three minutes left, the Celtics were still up by 11. And Rondo had been fouled, giving him an opportunity to extend the lead with at least one made free throw. But when Rondo missed them both, Rivers started to feel that sickness. He did believe that the Celtics were better; what he didn’t mean to imply was that they were so much better than the Lakers that they could relax against them.
“Don’t let them get comfortable,” he warned during a timeout. “And I’m not just talking about this game. I don’t want them to get comfortable for the next game. Especially their role-players.”
It was too late for all of that. This game, an easy win a few minutes earlier, was going to be a struggle until the end. With the Celtics up by 9 with less than two minutes to play, Pierce had the ball stolen from him, and Sasha Vujacic hit a 3 to cut the lead to 6. Pierce threw a sloppy pass on the next possession, and that turned into a Vladimir Radmanovic dunk. Four-point game. After Rondo missed a jumper, Bryant made two free throws with thirty-eight seconds left. Two-point game.
Finally, Pierce and James Posey were able to make their free throws, as well as a block by Pierce, to secure a 6-point win. While the Celtics were officially halfway to the championship, they’d also shown some vulnerabilities in game two. Indeed, they had given those role-players confidence.
Everyone knew the Lakers were going to adjust in LA. It would begin with Jackson using the off days to point out free-throw discrepancies. He’d bring attention to the inherent craziness of a world in which Powe—whose name he intentionally mispronounced to make it rhyme with “wow”—could get nearly twice as many attempts as Bryant. If his lobbying worked, and it usually did, it would set the tone for Bryant and his teammates in game three.
Perfect plan: The Lakers won game three by 6, Pierce shot a miserable 2 for 14 from the field, and Bryant attempted eighteen free throws, more than the Celtics’ entire starting five—and sixteen more than Leon Powe.
The Lakers had played nine playoff games in their downtown LA home and won all of them. It was all so routine there, with the best seats occupied by those who were either on the Hollywood Walk of Fame or destined to be there soon. Musicians and actors and comedians and influencers, all there to see their favorite NBA creative, Bryant.
He elevated in that environment, seeming to inhale all the energy and improvisational skill surrounding him. Bryant was tough for the Celtics to contain anywhere and nearly impossible in LA. He was the biggest reason there hadn’t been a hint of disappointment in the postseason at Staples Center. If the Celtics couldn’t deliver the Lakers their first home loss, they’d return to Boston needing to win two consecutive games for the title.
After the first half of game four, there was nothing that suggested a trend change. One quarter in, and the Lakers already held the record for the largest lead—21 points—after one quarter in NBA Finals history.
Halfway through the second, the lead bulging to 24, and still not a hoop from Bryant. This was, this was… this was something. Yes, that’s what Kris Rivers was trying to say as she texted her husband while she watched his team. She knew he wasn’t reading them and probably wouldn’t until postgame. But she’d watched him play and listened to him analyze and coach for twenty-five years now. Sometimes they sounded alike. As she sat next to their four children at Staples, she began firing off texts every time she saw something from the Celtics she didn’t like:
“This team is soft.”
“You guys need to move out of the Four Seasons and into a Motel Six.”
“My God! Move the ball! Tell your team to move the ball!”
“Play some defense.”
They were down 18 at the half, 58–40. Bryant had run into foul trouble and had just 3 of those 58 points. Applying basic logic and history, that wasn’t going to continue in the second half.
“We’ve got to relax and just play,” an assuring Rivers told the team.
Nope. No relaxing. No good basketball. They got a combination to the face in the third: Bryant finally scored from the field, and the lead was growing. It was 20, 68–48, five minutes into the quarter.
Rivers scanned his bench. He was looking for answers and taking suggestions. Rondo, who had been so active and confident in game two, seemed to be in a haze. He’d been replaced by Eddie House. Pierce asked to guard Bryant in the second half, knowing that he wouldn’t need any defensive help to slow Bryant down. If Bryant started to go off, Pierce was determined that it would happen against great defense.
Gradually, elements of game two in Boston seeped into game four in LA. Then, the Celtics nearly blew a 24-point lead in the fourth quarter. Here, it was happening earlier. A 3-point play by Pierce cut the LA lead to 9. There was a stirring in the crowd. House made a 3, and now the advantage was only 6.
During a break, Rivers looked at Garnett and said, “Never stop believing, baby.”
The almost retiree, PJ Brown, the big shotmaker against Cleveland, dunked, and they were down 2. With just over ten minutes left, a play was called in the huddle for Powe. He was surprised by it, and so were the veterans.
“You better make this shot,” Garnett told him.
It was a post-up against Lamar Odom, and Powe put in a bank shot to tie it with ten minutes to play.
Jack Nicholson, the devout Lakers fan and Rivers’s golfing buddy, was seated near the Celtics’ bench. He could hear the actor freaking out. “Oh boy, oh boy…”
The Celtics had been given too much time. When they went down by 4 halfway through the fourth, they were confident because they had enough space to make it up. That’s what happened two minutes later when a House hoop gave them their first lead of the game. It went from Lakers blowout, to Celtics playing competitively, to LA shock and desperation, all on the same night.
What happened? How was it that a Garnett hoop had the Celtics up by 5? In this building? With these stakes? It’s one thing to almost give back a 24-point lead. It’s akin to almost winning a game. But the Lakers had actually done it. They’d given up that lead, lost the game, and effectively the series.
“Doc, we’re dead men walking, aren’t we?” Nicholson said.
The coach didn’t want to be cocky, and he didn’t want his team to be that, either. But there was no way the Lakers were going to win three straight against them.
“Yes,” he answered his friend. “You are.”
No one in NBA Finals history had trailed by 24 and won that game. No finals team had ever been down 3–1 in a series and come back to win it. Pierce walked toward the locker room in his hometown, shouting. “That’s how you fight,” he said. “That’s how you do it, Cs.”
Down the hall, Bryant was succinct.
“We wet the bed,” he said. “It was one of those bad ones that can’t be covered up.”
Rivers checked his texts and saw a series of furious ones from his wife, with one at the end of the thread that read:
“I’m sorry. I hope you didn’t read any of those texts. Congratulations.”
It wasn’t surprising that the Lakers managed to win game five, temporarily taking the sting away from their game four collapse. Their next challenge was to go to Boston and beat the Celtics in consecutive games there. Forget about the long-forgotten games in the league’s distant history; in 2008, the Celtics didn’t lose two games in a row at home.
If they could only make it home. That was the challenge for the Celtics as two planes, a team plane and family plane, waited to depart from Los Angeles on Monday morning. The old Lakers used to be convinced that Red played mind games with them for a competitive advantage, and this had echoes of LA revenge.
The Lakers and Celtics shared the same hangar for their four planes, two for each team. The Celtics watched the two LA planes take off on time in front of them, at eleven a.m. One, two, three hours later, and the Celtics’ planes were still in LA. They waited so long that they were all able to watch Tiger Woods, with a left-knee injury, play his entire round during the U.S. Open at Torrey Pines. All the Tiger fans on the team were excited that he’d played his way to a Monday playoff. They were in LA so long that they wondered if they’d see that on the plane, too.
They finally landed in Boston just after one a.m. on the day of game six, when they were scheduled to be there around six p.m. the previous day.
Just as Nicholson and Justin Timberlake attended Lakers games as representatives of LA industry, the celebrity attendees at Celtics games spoke to what was at the heart of Boston: sports.
The nonplaying stars of the night were Patriots coach Bill Belichick and a quartet of NBA Finals MVPs who lowered themselves from the rafters and into courtside seats: Bill Russell, John Havlicek, Jo Jo White, and Cedric Maxwell.
The crowd was there long before the game began, creating a persistent buzz. This was KG’s kind of crowd, and it had been all year. The Garden was loud, shaking with anticipation. KG was at his locker in a lead-up to the game that was too charged even for him. The team’s equipment man, “Johnny Joe” Connors, interrupted him.
“KG, Coach wants to see you in his office.”
Minutes later, he was in there, breathing hard and talking fast.
“Wassup, Coach? What you need?”
Rivers had his head down. He could hear the locomotive that was Garnett. He sounded like a boxer midworkout, giving his best to the heavy bag.
“Coach,” KG repeated. “You need something?”
Rivers looked up briefly.
“I’ll be with you in just a minute, Kevin.”
He put his head back down again, writing a few notes. He waited two or three minutes for KG’s shifting and superpowered breathing to slow down a bit. Then he looked up.
“I’m good,” Rivers said. “You good?”
KG got it.
“Thank you. I needed that.”
This was the night for a championship.
Rivers decided to go with a different pregame speech. He knew that the malfunctioning planes and early-morning arrival threw off schedules. He didn’t want the distraction of that, so he went with a blunt, predictive approach. “Guys, tonight we’re not going to just win. We’re going to win by a lot. We’re going to win big. Don’t think about just playing; think about dominating and destroying.”
Three minutes into the game, Bryant made his own prediction: This was going to game seven. He laughed with a courtside fan and declared, “Not tonight.”
He, of all people, should have known better. His opponents were not the Celtic legends, or the Celtic crowd, or even the Celtics he had faced in the previous five games. No, he and the Lakers were the only obstacles separating the Big Three from unqualified success and recognition. No more, If they only had a championship… No more, Yeah, but… No more, good-but-not-great marginalizing…
Russell, the most decorated winner in the sport’s history, had befriended Garnett and was so struck by him that he’d made a promise. He told KG that if he didn’t win as a Celtic, he’d give Garnett one of his rings. The gesture from the seventy-four-year-old Russell made Garnett want to win it even more.
For Pierce, he’d been in Boston for a decade. He could answer almost every significant question in team history. One thing he didn’t know was what it was like to play a game in Boston in mid-June. He didn’t know the protocol for a home game, his home game, where the Larry O’Brien Trophy was there, possibly within the grasp of his team.
Ray Allen, the man of ritual and organization, looked at what was before him and tried to put it into its proper slot. It had been a difficult week for his family. His two-year-old son, Walker, had some health issues. When Allen wasn’t on a court, he was in a hospital. He’d played game five, gone to the hospital, and taken a red-eye flight back to Boston for game six. This would be a good time to take care of this small compartment, the game, so he could fully devote his time to his family.
These players and their coaches and their fans could feel it. It was one of those nights where the score was just there to confirm the feeling. Back-to-back 3s by the bench guys, House and Posey, put the Celtics up 9. The lead was 11, and the chant was “Ed-dee, Ed-dee…” when House ran into the stands for a loose ball. A 14-point cushion and a new chant—“MVP, MVP…” for Pierce at the free-throw line.
How high would it go?
It was at 21 when KG swerved into the lane, cupped the ball with one hand, and banked it in. Twenty-three, yes, 23, when Perkins scored on a layup from KG.
They maintained that lead, 23 points, at halftime.
“What do you think?” Wyc Grousbeck asked the man standing next to him at the bar in the Garden lounge. “Are you going to calm me down here?”
The man was Belichick, the Patriots coach who had trained the entire region to be methodical and assume nothing. Even when you’re ahead by 23.
“What are you drinking?” Belichick said.
“Tequila.”
“All right,” the coach said. “Tequila for the whole bar!”
This was Belichick? Grousbeck looked confused. Belichick explained.
“Let’s celebrate now. You’re winning the championship tonight.”
Maybe Bryant’s comment about the night was for the Lakers and not the Celtics. They were going to win a championship tonight, for sure. They just had to answer the last two questions of their season: How many points would they win by? And who would they play as they won? KG was Russell. Pierce was Havlicek. Allen was Sam Jones. Rivers and Ainge were both sides of Red Auerbach, coach and executive.
It was wild. They were up by 29 after three, and it was starting to sink in now. Another member of the Patriots, team president Jonathan Kraft, was there with Steve Pagliuca. Kraft had an African safari planned with his family, so he had to leave early. It was obvious by now that the city would celebrate its sixth championship parade in eight years.
Pags walked Kraft out, and he didn’t even mind that at just that moment a photographer had snapped a panoramic shot of the entire arena, championship in progress. For all time, his family would see the picture with themselves, but with Pags’s seat empty. It was all right. This made the story even better.
The Celtics hadn’t been together for a calendar year, and they’d already forged a brotherhood that they’d sworn was unbreakable. They’d assembled a new team and watched it immediately coalesce. They’d pulled off the biggest single-season turnaround, a forty-two-win improvement, in the history of the sport.
They weren’t easily summarized, even now, after 108 games, and it’s what made them great. They had passion, and that’s what made them relatable. They were showmen, pouring it on against the hated Lakers, and that’s what made them irresistible in Boston. When Allen hit his fifth 3 of the game, it was 101–70. He took another and made it: 104–70. He made his seventh of the night, and the Celtics were at 113.
Finally, Rivers had seen enough. He brought his three stars out of the game together, and together they stood there with him in a group hug. Rivers had tears in his eyes because the person on his mind was his father. He imagined what Grady might say as he watched all of this: Well done, and it’s about time.
As he had that thought, he simultaneously heard a splash and felt something cool around his shoulders and neck. Pierce had dumped a container of Gatorade on him, staining his crisp white shirt. Rivers smiled and said through his tears, “I don’t mind it.”
He was going to hold on to that shirt, just as Pierce was going to hold on to the NBA Finals MVP trophy he’d earned. With a couple of minutes left, Mike Zarren hugged Pierce. KG and Allen hugged Danny Ainge. With just seconds to go, Rivers looked around and became emotional at the scenes. So did Ainge. The theme of all the things around them was unmistakable. Family matters.
The last time Ainge won a championship was twenty-two years earlier, with the Big Three. He played great that night, and like these Celtics, his teammates won game six convincingly. But as Ainge, executive, let the atmosphere sink in, it occurred to him that this championship with the new Big Three was more rewarding than that one.
As an executive, you know more stories. As an executive, you’re thinking more about what it took for so many people to get to this moment. So he thought of all the players, coaches, members of his staff, and ownership group. He could feel his emotions heighten and then wash over him as he looked around the arena and identified everyone whose story he knew, and even those he didn’t. This wasn’t a bond with teammates; it was a bond with an entire franchise and region. More people than he’d ever realized were feeling this joy.
All the players had either siblings or wives or parents or children there. Little Walker Allen was there, being held by his father. Rivers’s fifteen-year-old son, Austin, who had dreams of playing in the NBA one day himself, draped an arm around him.
The Celtics were champions, and Rivers sang along as the music of Queen blared through the jubilant Garden. The final score, 131–92, captured each emphatic thing that happened in the game and season.
It was all over now, and Garnett stood for an interview.
“Anything is possible!” he said, tilting his head back. He said it again, this time louder and more melodious: “Anything is possi-buuuulll!”
He found Russell, and the two men embraced.
“Thank you for everything,” Garnett said to the great center. “I’ve got my own ring now. Now you’ve got to tell me where to go tonight. I was going to go home.”
One day last July, Pierce, Allen, and Garnett sat together at a joint press conference and made promises to themselves and New England. Then their coach took them on a run-through of a parade route. It would have been gimmicky if it hadn’t worked. But it did, and they’d become such total Celtics that their stats, in season or postseason, never mattered.
Indeed, Tex Winter, the eighty-six-year-old Laker assistant, had been on to something. Kobe Bryant’s defense on Allen didn’t get a lot of attention because the Lakers used him more on Rondo, daring him to take jumpers. But Allen’s series had been similar to his game: worthy of a shout, but so smooth that it was taken for granted. He was the only player in the series who made over 50 percent of his field-goal and 3-point attempts.
It was after midnight, and the real fun was still an hour or two away. Eventually, Zarren went to the Garden floor and played pickup basketball with some Celtics staffers and members of the media. In the locker room, players chugged champagne and beer and sat around trying to describe what they’d just done.
As it got later, and every Celtic employee had taken a picture with the trophy, Grousbeck picked it up and went home with it. He wasn’t going to leave it there when the party was still going strong. He left at three a.m., and the collective fatigue hadn’t hit yet. Friends of players, family members, team employees, media members—people were everywhere.
In the back of the locker room, KG, Leon Powe, Eddie House, and someone’s inquisitive friend talked about their first few hours of a championship existence. The friend went around the table.
“E-House, how do you feel about being a champion?”
House answered with a couple of quick superlatives.
“Leon Powe. How about you?”
Powe told him that it felt good to see everyone’s hard work pay off like this.
“KG. Tell us how you feel.”
Garnett wasn’t so caught up in the atmosphere that his sensors were off.
“Hold up,” he said. “House, is this dude with you?”
House shook his head.
“Powe, is he with you?”
Powe shook his head.
“So tell me—who in the hell are you?”
The friend, who was actually a random, passionate Celtics fan, had slipped unnoticed into the locker room.
“It was so awesome just to talk to you guys. Bye.”
Boston revolved around sports on normal days. For championship moments and championship teams, the lore lived forever. Garnett still didn’t get all of it, so when he told Russell that he was going to go home, he didn’t understand how his and all of their lives had changed. Winning in Boston meant that your house might be home, but so is every other crevice of the city.