Boston's Eighteenth Reason: A Deep Dive Into the 2024 Championship

English feature · same subject as above · Team: Boston Celtics / Star: Jaylen Brown

I The Night

June 17, 2024, TD Garden. The horn sounded and the board read 106-88. The green half of the building had been loud since the back half of the first quarter, and by the middle of the fourth the home crowd had stopped watching and started celebrating — 16 years of waiting, and the franchise's 18th championship, the one that put Boston alone at the top of the NBA again.

They led wire to wire. Not for a possession did Dallas hold an advantage. The Mavs got it to 16-15 early, and then Boston closed the first quarter on a 12-3 run, eight of those points coming from Tatum and Brown together. Dallas clawed a 15-point hole back to nine in the second, and Boston answered with a 19-7 burst capped by Payton Pritchard flinging one in from near half court at the buzzer. 67-46. It was the longest buzzer-beater in the Finals in a quarter century.

The second half was a formality. Boston still led by more than 20 midway through the fourth. Tatum sat on the bench with his face in his hands, bent over, crying, and later called it "the world" to him and "a long journey" to get there. Drafted in 2017, beaten in the 2022 Finals, beaten again at home in Game 7 of the 2023 conference finals — every one of those losses got cashed in on this night.

Eighteen means something specific. It means the Celtics passed the Lakers' 17 and now hold the most championships in league history — a first place they'd been tied for since Los Angeles caught them in 2020 and had to wait four years to reclaim outright. And the date? The 17th came on June 17, 2008. The 18th came on June 17, 2024. Boston's area code is 617. Nobody made that up; it just happened.

In the locker room, with the champagne still drying on the floor, Brown lifted the Bill Russell trophy. The Finals MVP award named for the greatest winner this franchise ever had belonged to him for the first time. A year earlier, half the city wanted him traded.

The stakes had been set in October, not June. Boston entered the season openly in win-it-all-or-nothing territory — the players said it, the front office said it, and every flat night in January got measured against a standard no 64-win team should have to live under. There was a reason for the pressure: this group had already lost a Finals and lost a conference finals Game 7 on its own floor. Another deep run without a ring would have confirmed every doubt anyone had ever voiced. Bill Russell's widow Jeannine and his daughter Karen sat inside TD Garden to watch the new champions get their rings. The man the trophy is named after won 11 of these himself. His family was there to hand over No. 18.

II The Finals MVP

The 2024 Finals MVP was Jaylen Brown. Twenty-seven years old, the No. 3 pick Boston made itself, and the sixth Celtic to take home the Bill Russell award — after Havlicek, Jo Jo White, Cedric Maxwell, Bird (twice) and Pierce.

The line doesn't jump off the page: 20.8 points, 5.4 rebounds, 5.0 assists and 1.6 steals a game, shooting 44%. Tatum led the team in points, rebounds and assists for the series — 22.2, 7.8 and 7.2 — and still lost the vote. What swung it was Brown's work on Luka Doncic. For five games he took the hardest defensive assignment in the sport, guarding the league's scoring champion, and made the Mavericks' first option uncomfortable from the opening tip.

He showed up in the games that mattered. Game 1: 22 points, 6 boards, 3 blocks, 3 steals — the first Celtic ever to put up 20 with three blocks and three steals in a Finals game. Game 3: 30 points, 8 rebounds and 8 assists, the assists a playoff career high, joining Tatum as only the second Boston pair to each go for 30 in a Finals game. He stunk in Game 4, scored 10, and answered with 21, 8 and 6 in the clincher, 15 of them before halftime.

Before any of that, he'd already won the Eastern Conference finals MVP — the Larry Bird Trophy — averaging 29.8 in a sweep of Indiana. That included the corner three that sent Game 1 to overtime, the biggest shot of his career to that point. Winning the conference finals MVP and the Finals MVP in one postseason isn't a thing many players have done.

And yet, months earlier, he was the guy people called overpaid. The five-year, $304 million supermax he signed in July 2023 — the richest deal in league history at the time — hung around his neck like an anchor. In the 2022 Finals he shot 31.8% from three over the last three games and turned it over 10 times in the last two while Golden State celebrated on Boston's floor. In the 2023 conference finals against Miami he went 7 of 43 from deep, 16.3%, and in Game 7 shot 8 of 23 with eight turnovers. This season he made his third All-Star team, got left off the All-NBA teams, and got left off the Olympic roster for Paris. Then he won Finals MVP.

"It was a full team effort," he said with the trophy in his hands. "I share this with my brothers and my partner in crime Jayson Tatum. He was with me the whole way." Then: "I never hung my head." Mazzulla's line afterward was better: "He's not afraid to face his weaknesses on the court. So when you have that type of mindset, you're just going to be able to take on every situation the game brings you."

His regular season had been quietly excellent in ways the awards voters kept skipping over. He made his third All-Star team in February, logged the third triple-double of his career in January, dropped a season-high 41 in March and crossed 10,000 career points in April. None of it got him onto an All-NBA team, and none of it got him onto the Olympic roster either. He stopped making the case for himself somewhere around the All-Star break and started guarding people instead. The hardware showed up anyway, handed over by the same voters who'd left him off in May.

III The Two of Them

Tatum and Brown are the most misread part of this team. By the time they finally won, they'd played 107 playoff games together — more than any duo in NBA history before winning a first title. No pair had ever been examined, second-guessed and taken apart for that long and still come out the other side holding the trophy.

The doubts weren't invented. Five conference finals, two Finals, and a habit of losing at the door: up 2-1 on Golden State in 2022 and beaten, down 0-3 to Miami in 2023, forced a Game 7, then flat at home in the decider. "Should they break them up?" ran on Boston sports radio for three straight years. Every offseason produced a dozen trade packages.

The front office didn't bite. Brad Stevens read it differently: the problem wasn't the two guys, it was what surrounded them. So in the summer of 2023 Boston moved Smart and Brogdon and brought in Kristaps Porzingis and Jrue Holiday — a targeted fix for a team that wasn't big enough or steady enough at guard, not a teardown.

Turned out the duo didn't need separating. It needed help. Tatum made the All-NBA First Team and stayed the engine. Brown took the toughest defensive job and stopped caring who got the credit. The long hug at the end of Game 5 was seven years of pressure leaving the building. Brown put it best: all those moments of coming up short, of feeling like they'd let the city down, piled up into the thing that got them here.

What made it work was the split. Tatum led the team in points, rebounds and assists and still let Brown take the other team's best player night after night. Brown accepted he wouldn't be the box-score guy and bet his value on everything the box score misses. That kind of mutual giving-in looks more like a championship than any 40-point night does.

What got lost in all that noise is how rare the consistency was. In seven seasons together, Tatum and Brown never missed the playoffs, reached five Eastern Conference finals and two Finals. Plenty of franchises would trade a decade for one of those runs. Boston got seven years of them and still got told it wasn't enough — which only sounds harsh if you accept that losing in the conference finals counts as a normal season. This group never accepted that, and it's why the city never stopped arguing about them. Nobody argues about teams that don't matter.

IV The Road

The regular season was 64-18, the best record in the league and the best winning percentage in the East since the 2012-13 Heat. Boston opened 20-0 at home, took the No. 1 seed around mid-November and never gave it back, finishing 14 games clear of the second seed — the widest gap between the top two East seeds since 1976.

The efficiency numbers are the wild part. An offensive rating of 123.2, the highest in NBA history. 1.22 points per possession, also the best ever. A net rating of +11.6, third-best all time, outscoring teams by 11.3 a night. And the league's No. 1 defense. A team that shot the most threes and defended harder than anybody doesn't leave many openings.

Then they went 16-3 in the playoffs, the second-best title run since the league went to all best-of-seven in 2003, behind only the 2017 Warriors at 16-1. The path: Miami in five, Cleveland in five, a sweep of Indiana, Dallas in five. The conference final was the only sweep; everything else was closed out on the road or at home in five.

A few details tell the story. Boston started 6-0 away from home in the postseason, hit 14-2 at one point with nine straight wins, and held opponents under 100 in nine of their 16 games. Their playoff net rating of +11.1 made them the first team since the 2018 Warriors to clear +10 across a postseason.

All of it while short-handed. Porzingis strained his soleus in Game 4 of the first round and missed the next two rounds; Boston went 9-1 without him. When he came back for Game 1 of the Finals, the team was already knocking on a 3-0 lead. Depth wasn't a luxury on this roster. It was the plan from October.

They also did it with an identity rather than a hot month. Boston led the league in three-point attempts and made enough of them to drag every defense out to the perimeter, then had the length to punish teams inside when the shots stopped falling. Their route through the East later got labeled easy, because Miami, Cleveland and Indiana each lost key players along the way. Fair enough. But 16-3 doesn't happen by accident, and no one else in that bracket came close to it.

V The Roster Puzzle

Around the two stars sat a group of guys who knew exactly what they were. Jrue Holiday was the prize of that preseason trade — Milwaukee dumped him to go get Damian Lillard, and Boston happily took the call. In the clincher he had 15 points, 11 rebounds and 4 assists, and spent the night switching onto Doncic and Irving. Quietest important player on the floor.

Derrick White is the other guard the numbers never quite catch. He hit a buzzer-beater to win a playoff game, took charges, and switched onto bigs without flinching. Holiday and White together were the most irritating backcourt defense in the league — opponents spent entire series hunting a mismatch that never came.

Inside, it was Porzingis and Al Horford trading shifts. Porzingis came back for Game 1 of the Finals and immediately gave them size and spacing, then got hurt again, then dragged himself through 17 minutes in Game 5 for five points. He also became the first player born in Latvia to win a championship.

Then there's Horford. Thirty-eight years old, 17th season, and before this ring he'd played 186 playoff games without one — the most in NBA history before a first title, with only Karl Malone (193) having played more and never won at all. He's also the first Dominican player to win it all. A guy who got booed here, left, and came back, standing on his spot at the end.

Off the bench there were Pritchard's two half-court heaves, Sam Hauser's shooting, Luke Kornet and Neemias Queta filling minutes. Queta became the first Portuguese-born champion. Titles aren't won by five guys. This roster spent a whole season proving the eighth and ninth men matter too.

The balance showed up in the box scores all spring. Six different Celtics — Tatum, Brown, Holiday, Horford, Porzingis and White — each had at least one 20-point playoff game, and four different players led the team in scoring in a game during the run. There was no night when Boston needed one guy to be superhuman just to survive. That isn't a quirk of matchups. It's what happens when a roster is built to withstand a cold shooting night from its best player, and it's the reason a strained calf in April never turned into a crisis in June.

VI The Gamble

You can trace this trophy back to the 2013 trade everyone hated: Garnett and Pierce to Brooklyn for a pile of first-rounders. Those picks became Jaylen Brown in 2016 and Jayson Tatum in 2017, back-to-back No. 3 selections. Ten years on, the deal that was supposed to have mortgaged the future is the reason the future showed up.

Brad Stevens ran the whole line. He joined as head coach in 2013, moved to the front office in 2021, and then rebuilt the team he used to coach. He was named the 2023-24 Executive of the Year. This title was the top of a ten-year climb and his first ring in any role.

Joe Mazzulla was the other bet. He got the job days before the 2022-23 season, and the general read was that he was too young, too rigid, a placeholder. Two years later, at 35, he's the youngest coach to win a title since Bill Russell in 1969. He didn't reinvent himself. He just made "take the right shot every possession" a reflex for the entire roster.

The real gamble was patience. Through three years of "they're not good enough, break them up," the front office patched instead of detonating. Through a season of Mazzulla skepticism, the organization stayed put. Neither decision was fashionable. Both were right.

What's rare about Boston is that it was willing to wait a decade for two players to grow up. In a league where stars demand trades and windows close in months, that kind of slow is its own rebellion — and it's the rhythm this city has always been comfortable with.

The staff around Mazzulla carried its own history. Sam Cassell won his fourth championship, having taken three as a player in 1994, 1995 and 2008. Charles Lee got his second, after 2021 with Milwaukee. For Anthony Dobbins, Amile Jefferson, D.J. MacLeay and Matt Reynolds, this was the first. A coaching room that mixes men who'd been here before with men who hadn't is a decent metaphor for the roster sitting in front of them — and for a franchise that spent ten years climbing back to this exact night.

VII The Tuition

Dallas deserves a tip of the cap. The fifth seed in the West at 50-32, they beat the Clippers in six, knocked off the top-seeded Thunder in six — coming back from 17 down at half in Game 6 — and handled Minnesota in five, winning all three games in Minneapolis. Luka Doncic took the Western Conference finals MVP at 32.4 a game, and on the night they clinched, he and Kyrie Irving scored 36 apiece.

The Finals were a different animal. Doncic had 28 and 12 in Game 5 but coughed up seven turnovers and went 2 of 9 from three. He led the Mavericks in points, rebounds and assists in nearly every game of the series and still couldn't lift the group. Boston's plan was simple and ruthless: let him score, cut off everything he feeds.

Irving had it worse. The former Celtic, gone since 2019, averaged 14.3 points across three games at TD Garden and shot 5 of 16 for 15 in the clincher. Dallas lost all three. Against his old team, in that building, with that crowd riding him from warmups, he never found a rhythm. Boston fans hadn't forgiven him and weren't about to start.

The one wobble was Game 4, when Dallas won 122-84 at home by 38 to avoid the sweep and bought 24 hours of "here we go" chatter. Back in Boston, the Celtics never let it breathe: 51-35 on the glass, 17 of 20 at the line against Dallas's 7 of 13.

It was the Mavericks' first Finals in 13 years, since 2011 — the team whose starting point guard that year is now their head coach, Jason Kidd. Expensive tuition. But a fifth seed getting there at all tells you the core is real, and that's usually where the next chapter starts.

Dallas wasn't a fluke that got exposed, either. From March 7 to the end of the regular season the Mavericks posted the league's best defensive rating, and from February 1 they went 36-15, second only to Boston. The deadline pickups of Daniel Gafford and P.J. Washington turned a soft frontcourt into a real one, and rookie Dereck Lively II gave them a rim presence they hadn't had in years. They just ran into a team that had spent two seasons preparing for exactly this kind of opponent and had an answer ready for every adjustment Kidd tried.

VIII The City and the Map

On June 21, Boston threw the parade. Duck boats rolled out from TD Garden, past City Hall Plaza and the Common, down Tremont and ending on Boylston. Estimates put the crowd north of a million, with the commuter rail moving what it called five weekdays' worth of ridership in about five hours.

The 18th banner goes up in the fall. For this city it isn't just another flag — it's taking "most championships in NBA history" back from Los Angeles, a title that had been shared since the Lakers tied it in 2020. Boston had been waiting four years for the tie to break its way.

It's also the 13th championship this century for a Boston-area team across the four major leagues. Patriots, Red Sox, Bruins, Celtics — this town has turned parades into municipal procedure. Other cities spend six months planning one. Boston has a template.

Zoom out and the title says something about how to win here. No superteam assembled overnight, no shortcut. Draft picks, patience and a system, held long enough to compound. Stevens turned two No. 3 picks into a 64-win team in ten years. Mazzulla turned shot discipline into a reflex in two.

The image that'll stick is Brown hoisting the Bill Russell trophy. A kid who'd been doubted for seven years, a contract that had been mocked for two, a duo everyone said should be split up for three — all of it became the eighteenth reason on a June night in Boston.

Tatum, Holiday and White all won Olympic gold in Paris that same summer, joining the short list of players to take a title and a gold medal in the same year — Holiday for the second time, matching Scottie Pippen. Weeks after the parade, owner Wyc Grousbeck put the franchise up for sale; it went in March 2025 for $6.1 billion. Banner 18, though, isn't going anywhere. Neither is the argument that this one was built rather than bought — ten years, two lottery picks, and a front office that kept saying no to the easy way out.

Related Reading

More NBA championship deep dives:

• 2015 Warriors Championship Deep Dive
• 2017 Warriors Championship Deep Dive
• 2018 Warriors Championship Deep Dive
• 2022 Warriors Championship Deep Dive

Video Recap

Official Finals MVP highlights: