Inside the Auerbach Center, the Boston Celtics’ new training facility, the team installed two sets of championship banners to match the official ones in their arena seven miles down Mas Pike.
To say that these 17 banners are sacred to the organization may be an understatement. So why not have as many duplicates as possible?
One morning in the building last June, as team owner Wick Grossbeck was preparing to officially announce his decision to promote Brad Stevens as team president, the two men signed a pact under these symbolic flags.
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“We committed to each other that we would win banner 18,” Grossbeck said, “or we would die trying.”
Banner 18. This is the popular rallying for the two legacy NBA organizations: the Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers.
This championship battle, shrouded in decades of rivalry, has made the Lakers a shadowy Celtics opponent during these unfolding NBA Finals in 2022. Both teams are 17, and it’s a deep-seated high-stakes race to take the all-time lead. the league.
The Lakers have won six titles against the Celtics since the turn of the century, narrowing the gap. When the Lakers won in 2020, it equaled teams for the first time since 1963 (Minneapolis Lakers won six of the first eight titles in league history).
This season in LA, there were high hopes that the acquisition of Russell Westbrook would lead the Lakers to add the 18th star to the logo on their central court, a driving force of the Buss family to fulfill the dream of their late patriarch.
The Lakers currently have 17 stars around their logo on the half-court at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles. These stars represent each of the 17 championships the organization has won. Photo by Jevone Moore / Icon Sportswire
“He has always been a doctor. [Jerry] “Buss’ goal to beat Boston,” said Lakers great Irwin “Magic” Johnson, who led the Lakers to five of those championships. “The Lakers never want the Celtics to win.”
“Dr. Buss would always say the loss was bad enough, but the loss to the Celtics is unbearable,” said Michael Thompson, who won two LA titles, including one over Boston in the 1987 finals.
“Now we’re all Warriors fans,” he said. “They have to do us a favor and keep us on par with Boston. We can’t let them get to 18 before us.”
The longstanding rivalry is told in a long series of books, movies, plays on Broadway and most recently in the HBO series “Winning Time”, which includes dramatized nonsense between Buss and Celtics legend Red Auerbach. However, this finale is just an example of the many proxy battles fought between the two countries over the years.
It has taken many forms and forms. In the 1982 Eastern Conference finals, for example, when the Philadelphia 76ers had Game 7 in hand at Boston Garden, the audience dropped their disappointment to chant “Beat LA” as an encouragement to the 76ers and their upcoming finals match. The Lakers won in six.
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When Doc Rivers, who coached the Celtics for the 2008 Lakers title, joined the LA Clippers as president and coach of the team in 2013, he ordered the Lakers ‘championship banners to be covered during the Clippers’ overall matches. then Staples Center. It was part of a branding designed to give the Clippers their own identity … with the added benefit of disguising the Lakers’ success.
This continues today. Warriors coach Steve Kerr, who grew up as a Lakers fan in Southern California, would love to help the Celtics stay 17.
“I grew up watching Magic and [Larry] “Bird did it in the ’80s,” Kerr said. “I was literally sitting on the back row of the forum when Kevin McHale took out Kurt Rambis and changed the series [in 1984]”
Guardian of Warriors Clay Thompson, Michael’s son, feels the same way.
“I was watching [Lakers vs. Celtics] in college, Game 7, at Staples Center, with my father in 2010, and now it’s 12 years later and I can play with the team I was sick of, “said Thompson.” So life is coming full circle, now I can play with them in the finals. “
There are endless such stories – about the neglect that the countries have treated each other over the years.
When former Lakers coach Pat Riley published his book Show Time in 1988, he put it this way: “Boston Mysticism promotes the lowest common denominator of fan behavior. It is growing directly from the low-rent ratio of the Boston leadership. They’re the NBA’s Klingons. “
In 2004, when coach Phil Jackson led the Lakers to the final and was close to breaking Auerbach’s nine-league record, Auerbach complained in an interview with the Washington Post: “Why can’t he just say, ‘I’m the lucky SOB this [general manager] Jerry West gave me these boys?
Led by Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, the 1980s were a golden age for the NBA. Andrew D. Bernstein / NBAE / Getty Images
The Pistons won five games. Four years later, when the Celtics won their only title in 36 years, beating Jackson and the Lakers in six games, Grossbeck said, “This victory is for Red Auerbach,” who died two years earlier.
In 2019, Grossbeck and current Lakers owner Ginny Buss teamed up with other owners, Michael Jordan of the Charlotte Hornets and Wes Eden of the Milwaukee Bucks, to launch a high-end tequila brand. But when Grossbeck attended the inaugural event of the Lakers-Phoenix Suns, the Celtics owner made it clear he was not there to support LA.
“I congratulate Suns tonight,” he told Spectrum SportsNet. “If I’m sick of the Lakers, Red Auerbach will come out of his grave and strangle me.
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With the Celtics already three wins from No. 18, the rhetoric is likely to intensify again. And most of all, the garbage talk.
“It always means everything when you face the Lakers,” said Cedric Maxwell, who won two Boston titles, including MVP in the 1981 finals, and is known for throwing thorns against the great Lakers, James Worthy, as in the media. so in private.
“They are supposed to be connected to us,” he said. “People say they’re the NBA flag bearer, but the Celtics have been that from the beginning. And James Worthy, after we win this championship, I want you to smell our ass as we go.”
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