Celtics’ past still plays a role today
New-age team finds way to coexist with storied history
When Bill Walton revived and concluded his NBA career with the Celtics, he devised a plan on game nights to beat the city’s notoriously gridlocked traffic: He rode the subway to work.
Picture a towering, unmistakable redhead, 6 feet 11 inches, boarding the T, as it’s known in Boston, at the Harvard station. Walton lived nearby during the Celtics’ 1985-86 championship season, and in 1986-87, when they lost in the NBA Finals to the Lakers.
“Red Line to the Green Line to the old Garden,” he said. “And with a packed car of crazed fans banging on the walls and ceiling, rocking the car, chanting, ‘Here we go Celtics, here we go!’ ”
In a recent telephone interview, Walton added that after six injury-plagued years with the dysfunctional and Donald Sterling-owned Clippers of San Diego and Los Angeles, those rides were neither scary nor a culture shock for a West Coast native.
“It was heaven,” he said.
The old Boston Garden was replaced in 1995 by what is known now as TD Garden. But the bustling North Station commuter hub remains, reached by the T’s trolley cars clanging through tunnels old enough for archaeological digs.
So, too, exists the famed parquet playing floor, with a few pieces from the original Garden: the now 23 retired jersey banners, a fair number of ruddy-faced ushers with Southie accents, and scalpers hiding in plain sight out on Causeway Street.
“The TD Garden is not a very glamorous arena, like what the Warriors built in San Francisco,” said Marv Albert, the Hall of Fame broadcaster whose radio debut — Knicks at Celtics, Jan. 27, 1963 — was in Boston. “And with the surrounding area and the Celtics’ history, there is still an old-time feel to it.”
To that end, when the NBA Finals returned to Boston for the first time since 2010 — with the aforementioned Warriors hitting town for Game 3 on Wednesday night — it was the league’s version of strolling the somewhat gentrified but still old neighborhood, making the nostalgic rounds of where it grew up.
Game 3 ended too late for this edition. It wasn’t until years after the Bill Russellera Celtics won 11 titles from 1957 through 1969 that professional basketball became a hot ticket in Boston, or anywhere in the U.S., much less a sexy global sell. But it was largely at North Station, that nexus of unwieldy urban design, that the NBA progressed from crawl to walk.
It has been a rough few years, the losses of the retired number Celtics painful and profound for those who remain from the franchise’s unmatchable dynastic period. John Havlicek, No. 17, died in 2019; K.C. Jones (25) and Tom Heinsohn (15), in 2020; Sam Jones (24) in 2021; Jo Jo White (10), a 1970s star on two title teams, in 2018.
Still, Dan Shaughnessy, the venerable Boston Globe columnist, checked in recently with Bob Cousy (No. 14), who told him, “To have this happen at 93 is really a special moment.” He meant the Celtics’ 22nd championship series, 17 of which they’ve won, deadlocked with the Lakers franchise that originated in Minneapolis.
There’s always temptation to overstate comparisons to champions of yore, especially when remembering that the Celtics have won exactly one title since 1986. But some have pointed out that rugged point guard Marcus Smart evokes memories of K.C. Jones and Larry Bird’s 1980s running mate, Dennis Johnson (retired No. 3). And while Tatum may never be Bird (retired No. 33) in the collective mind of the Boston masses, he, at 24, appears destined to have his number, 0, join Robert Parish’s 00 in the rafters.
After all, it took one title, in 2008, for Kevin Garnett (retired No. 5) and Paul Pierce (34) to make it.
The current center, Robert Williams III, is no Russell (retired No. 6), but he, at 24, is a genuine, homegrown rim protector. Horford, who plays in the image of the 1970s glue guy Paul Silas, was reacquired last offseason, the kind of canny team-building addition the Celtics were known for across four decades of winning titles.