SB Nation Reacts: 80’s Celtics are kings of the court

As we celebrate History Month here at CelticsBlog, we just had to ask who would win a round robin of the Celtics greatest championship teams. Despite some crossover, we divided the franchise’s rich history into five squads by the stars that powered them: Bob Cousy and Bill Russell; Dave Cowen and John Havlicek; Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, and Robert Parish; Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, and Ray Allen; Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown.

The 80s Celtics were the resounding winners. Coincidentally, we’re right in the middle of that Big Three’s championship run with the ’84 banner to close out Week 3 of CelticsBlog’s History Month.

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Here’s CB’s Rich Jensen setting the stage for Bird & Co. for beating LA:

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 uneven surface that matched the tough and gritty character of the arena built around it.

The Celtics played in Boston—a crowded city where the past was present everywhere, where landmarks from the beginning of the nation were part of the fabric of everyday life, a city somehow nicknamed ‘Beantown.’ It had everything that L.A. lacked—history, tradition, cultural institutions—and it was hopelessly, helplessly uncool.

The 1984 Finals were a culture clash as well as a basketball contest.

There’s certainly a mystique surrounding those Bird teams….

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Publish date : 2026-08-21 13:48:00

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