Banner Years: 1984, Bird vs. Magic—at last

NBA history spans 80 seasons, and as CelticsBlog readers well know, the Boston Celtics have won a league-high 18 championships. This month, we are recapping each of those title years.

Bird vs. Magic – Showtime vs. well, a team that wasn’t cool enough to have a nickname for its style of play. Boston vs. LA. Old vs. New. Gold and purple vs. green and white.

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It was the 80s and the Lakers were the 80s in basketball form.

They played in the “Fabulous Forum” on a court that was trimmed in gold. Their head coach, Pat Riley, was a fashion plate as well as a competent strategist who had delivered a championship in his first year on the bench.

They had a player who more than lived up to his ‘Magic’ nickname. They had celebrities sitting courtside. They came from a city where it never rained and where winter was more theoretical than real. This was the city where dreams became reality, or at least as real as movies could make them. It was a city that was known, around the world, by just two letters: L.A.

Their star, with his infectious grin, had already made good in the NCAAs, defeating Larry Bird in the Final Four, and he’d won a pair of championships in the NBA as well.

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At literally the other end of the country were the Celtics.

If the Lakers were the 80s personified, then the Celtics were the foundation and the first few floors of NBA history. They were run by Red Auerbach, who had been a fixture in the league from its inception. He had won fourteen championships by this point in time—nine as a coach and five as a general manager. They wore uniforms that were barely distinguishable from the ones that the team was wearing when Red was hired to coach them more than thirty years earlier. Their arena was a relic—a cramped relic painted mostly yellow, without air conditioning, with seats that were jammed together and placed behind columns and every one of them had been occupied for every single game the Celtics played for the past three seasons.

The Celtics played on a parquet court that had been trod by the league’s legends going back to the first year after World War II. It was a scarred and…

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Publish date : 2026-08-21 10:00:00

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