The Boston Celtics Aren’t Just NBA Champions. They’re One of the Most Dominant Teams Ever. (2024)

In the end, the Boston Celtics’ greatest competition in the 2023-24 season turned out to be themselves.

It certainly wasn’t any opponent during the regular season, when the Celtics posted a 64-18 record with a historically great point differential. It wasn’t the injury-ravaged Miami Heat in the first round, or the undermanned Cleveland Cavaliers in the second, or the happy-to-be-there Indiana Pacers in a conference finals sweep. It wasn’t even Luka Doncic, Kyrie Irving, and the Dallas Mavericks in the Finals, where Boston never trailed in four of five fourth quarters.

No, the Celtics’ greatest competition was an intrasquad battle—not on the scoreboard, but for awards, as Jaylen Brown bested Jayson Tatum in a friendly game of tug-of-war for the Finals MVP trophy, aptly named after Celtic icon Bill Russell. Boston was so much better than every opponent it faced that it had to stretch to drum up some drama along the way to a title.

And what a title it is—the record 18th for the franchise, and the capstone to one of the greatest statistical seasons in NBA history. The Celtics won Game 5 in front of a delirious home crowd on Monday, 106-88, with a wire-to-wire triumph that paralleled their march as the wire-to-wire best team in the league all season long.

Every Celtic contributed to the clincher. Tatum tied his Finals career high with 31 points and added 11 assists. Brown chipped in 21 points, eight rebounds, and six assists. Jrue Holiday and Derrick White combined for 29 points and 19 rebounds—from the backcourt!—alongside their typically tenacious defense. Al Horford, finally earning a ring after 17 NBA seasons and 186 playoff games, nearly reached a double-double. Kristaps Porzingis buoyed the bench in his return from injury. Reserve Sam Hauser sank a pair of 3-pointers. Even Payton Pritchard made the most of limited playing time, nailing a half-court shot to end the first half with pizzazz.

That overwhelming team effort yielded a blowout win representative of Boston’s broader superlative season. The Celtics outscored teams in the regular season by 11.3 points per game, the fifth-largest margin ever, and they followed up with a plus-8.1 differential in the playoffs. From opening night through the last buzzer of the Finals, Boston outscored its opponents by 1,083 total points—the fourth-highest raw point differential in NBA history, one spot behind the best Durant-era Warriors squad.

That massive point differential translated into wins at a historic rate. Counting both regular season and playoffs, the Celtics went 80-21 this season, for the 11th-best winning percentage among all NBA championship teams.

And in the playoffs alone, the Celtics became the third team in the 21st century, and the ninth team since the introduction of the modern playoff format in 1983-84, to lose three games or fewer en route to a title.

Boston certainly benefited along the way from opponent injuries, which produced the easiest path to the Finals for any team in the modern era. But the Celtics withstood a key injury of their own through the majority of the postseason, as they went 10-2 when Porzingis was out of the lineup. And regardless, the journey doesn’t spoil the meaning of the ultimate destination; as I wrote last month, the previous “easiest paths” belonged to the mid-’80s Lakers, whose legacy is not remotely tarnished by the mediocrity of their conference rivals at the time.

Moreover, it’s unlikely any of their Eastern Conference opponents could have kept up with Boston even if fully healthy—the Celtics won the East by 14 games in the regular season, a post-merger record for a conference leader. They also would have likely won the West by a sizable margin, if the city of Boston had mysteriously migrated 1,500 miles last August. The Celtics were just as dominant against Western foes as they were against Eastern ones, even though they had to play all the best in the West and didn’t have to play the East’s top team (themselves).

Fitting for a team in the 2020s, the Celtics married the best stylistic traits of the 2000s (stifling perimeter defense) and the 2010s (offensive spacing). They finished with the most efficient offense in NBA history, which managed to improve in the season’s second half even as scoring declined across the league. They made the second-most 3-pointers in NBA history, at a 38.8 percent clip. They finished with the second-best defense this season and placed multiple guards on the All-Defensive team.

The roster that coalesced to produce such dominance came together almost entirely through shrewd, opportunistic trades, as both Danny Ainge and Brad Stevens turned in master classes from the general manager seat.

Ainge built the foundation back in July 2013, via one of the most lopsided trades in league history, when he sent aging franchise legends Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett to Brooklyn for future picks. The Nets won one playoff series with their hastily assembled superteam before crumbling, to Boston’s benefit; meanwhile, the Celtics missed the playoffs once and immediately returned to contention. In 2017, they reached the conference finals and won the draft lottery, courtesy of a Brooklyn pick, in the same 24-hour window.

When Ainge left in 2021, Stevens replaced his former boss and added the finishing touches to the former’s initial construction. Stevens’s first trade as a lead executive brought Horford back to Boston, where the veteran big had been an All-Star several years earlier. In the middle of the next season, Stevens poached White from the Spurs. And last offseason, he traded former Defensive Player of the Year Marcus Smart for Porzingis, then opportunistically replaced Smart with Holiday after the Bucks dealt Holiday for Damian Lillard.

Stevens definitively won each of those deals. Here is every player or pick that he traded in exchange for Holiday, Porzingis, and White:

• Marcus Smart
• Malcolm Brogdon
• Robert Williams III
• Danilo Gallinari
• Mike Muscala
• Julian Phillips
• Romeo Langford
• Moses Brown (for Josh Richardson, who was part of the White trade)
• No. 25 pick in 2022 (used on Blake Wesley)
• 2028 pick swap with Spurs
• 2029 first-round pick

There are some good players in that group—but Holiday, Porzingis, and White are better than all of them. And that bullet-pointed list doesn’t include all that many picks, especially compared to the hauls that other contenders have dealt for stars in recent years.

The result of all those swindles was phenomenal top-end depth and the best starting lineup in the NBA. The Celtics don’t have a leading MVP candidate, but they boast five of the top 50 players in the league, per our Top 100 rankings; no other team has more than three.

And the manner in which Boston acquired all those core players builds on the broader history of the franchise that can hang the most championship banners. The Celtics have always won when they’ve taken their biggest swings with trades. In the 1950s, they traded two future Hall of Famers (Ed Macauley and Cliff Hagan) for Bill Russell; 11 titles ensued. In the 1980s, they traded two first-round picks—including no. 1 overall—for Robert Parish and a no. 3 pick, which they used on Kevin McHale; three more titles followed. In the 2000s, they won their only title between 1986 and 2024 after making slam-dunk deals for Garnett and Ray Allen, who joined Pierce in a trendsetting iteration of a Big Three.

These Celtics followed that same pattern with two connected deals for their eventual stars. First, as in the 1950s, they traded two future Hall of Famers (Garnett and Pierce) for picks, which landed them Brown and a no. 1 selection. Then, as in the 1980s, they traded that no. 1 choice for no. 3 in the same draft, which brought Tatum to Boston instead of Markelle Fultz.

It took some time for Brown and Tatum to climb all the way to the NBA summit. No serious analyst could ever claim the Celtics were due, in a historical sense—the Lakers are the only other franchise with half as many titles as Boston’s 18—but in a more limited, recent frame, this era of Celtics basketball had experienced unprecedented playoff success without a title.

Boston lost in the Finals in 2022 and in the conference finals in 2017, 2018, 2020, and 2023. From 2016-17 through 2022-23, the Celtics won 61 playoff games—the most in a seven-year stretch in NBA history for any team that didn’t win a championship. The previous overall record belonged to the Jazz from 1992 through 1998 (57 playoff wins); the previous 21st-century record belonged to the Thunder from 2010 through 2016 (50 playoff wins).

The Celtics could have ended up like the ’90s Jazz or the Durant-Westbrook Thunder, who exemplify two separate paths not taken by Boston. For Utah, Karl Malone and John Stockton stayed together, but were never quite good enough to win it all; such was the fear with the Tatum-Brown duo. For Oklahoma City, too many close calls without a title led to internal discontent and Durant’s departure; such could have been the outcome if the Celtics decided they needed to break up their own star pair.

But the Celtics never deviated from building around their young wings, even after a lost season in 2021 and consecutive, crushing playoff wobbles in the following two years. In the 2022 conference finals, they almost blew a 13-point lead in the final four minutes of Game 7, only for Miami’s Jimmy Butler to miss a would-be game-winning 3-pointer. In the 2022 Finals, they took a 2-1 lead against Golden State and were ahead in crunch time of Game 4, only to lose that game and the next two. In 2023, they struggled to put away the 41-41 Hawks in the first round, needed seven games to beat the 76ers, and, worst of all, dropped the first three games of the conference finals to the eighth-seeded Heat, before ultimately succumbing in a monumental upset.

The supporting cast around the star wings improved, but so did Tatum and Brown themselves. They’re more cohesive teammates and more complete two-way players in 2024, and they’re mentally tougher after learning from previous playoff defeats. “My experiences—the heartbreaks, the losses—have all kind of cultivated into what you see now,” Brown said this month. Contrasting this Celtics squad with the version that lost in the 2022 Finals, he added, “We’ve grown from that. We really have.”

It wasn’t always easy to believe in that capacity for growth, or in Boston’s superb statistical résumé. Scarred by the Celtics’ history of playoff stumbles and their penchant for stagnant offense in clutch moments, more than half of ESPN’s analysts picked Dallas to win the Finals, and a huge majority of gamblers reportedly bet on the Mavericks to pull the upset.

The Celtics proved them wrong, instead cementing their supremacy over the rest of a deep and talented league—in part by bludgeoning opponents so thoroughly in the first 43 minutes that they rarely ever needed to win close games, or at least entered clutch time with a lead and a margin for error.

Such was the case with their coronation on Monday: Boston led by double digits for the entire second half, allowing the benches to empty early and the victorious crowd to celebrate practically all night long. The final game of the 2023-24 NBA season wasn’t close. How could it be, when Boston was so far ahead of every team it played?