Five years ago, in the summer of 2007, the Boston Celtics were mired in the worst stretch in their franchise history. Not only had they gone 21 years without a championship banner, but they had also had one of the worst seasons any Celtics team had ever endured. After desperately tanking the 2006-2007 season in order to have a shot at one of two potentially franchise altering players (Greg Oden and Kevin Durant), the Celtics entered the lottery with the second best chance to win the #1 overall pick. For a team that had missed out on the best power forward ever exactly 10 years earlier despite having the best odds, many Celtics fans figured this time around would be retribution for having Tim Duncan slip from their grasp. Naturally, they ended up with the #5 overall pick (or as it's better known, the moment where I almost became a 13 year old alcoholic). Just another unlucky moment in a long string of unlucky moments that started with the death of Len Bias two days after he was drafted in 1986. At the time, I was devastated. Even though I was only in middle school I understood the gravity of the situation. The fifth pick meant no Oden or Durant. It meant that Paul Pierce would likely be traded. It meant that the Celtics were looking at another 10 seasons of mediocrity.
Except things didn't turn out that way.
You see, after the Celtics lost the lottery in 2007, they decided to accelerate the process of building a championship contender rather than starting from scratch again. You all know the story by now: The C's dealt for Ray Allen, the greatest three-point shooter of all time, then swung a massive blockbuster trade for perennial All-Star and former MVP forward Kevin Garnett, forming a Hall of Fame trio with Paul Pierce reminiscent of legendary Celtics teams featuring the names Bird, Parish and McHale. The New Big Three swept us off our feet, simultaneously changing the culture of the Celtics from a consistent loser to a organization where winning was the only thing that mattered while posting the second best regular season record in Celtics history en route to raising a 17th championship banner with a victory over the hated Los Angeles Lakers that summer. In one whirlwind season, the Celtics went from rebuilding for another decade to champions. In effect, Garnett, Pierce, and Allen saved basketball in Boston.
From there, the Celtics battled through bad breaks (Garnett injuring his knee in 2009, Perkins injuring HIS knee in the 2010 Finals, Rondo's elbow bending in half the wrong way in 2011, the multitude of injuries in 2012) to have a highly successful five year run. One championship, two Finals appearances, three trips to the conference finals, and innumerable memories, some of which I've had the fortune to experience firsthand. Through it all, one thing remained constant: These guys cared. And that's what made it such a special experience. When they won, you felt elated because you knew how much pain and effort and work that this team put in day out. When they came up short, you felt the biting venom of defeat with them for those same reasons. By this season, we had become so familiar with them that we knew when Paul Pierce was going to take an irrational shot that had no business going through the net, and yet we weren't surprised when it (almost inevitably) did. We watched Ray Allen weave in in out of screens so much that we had a better idea of where he was going than most defenders did. We saw so many moments where Kevin Garnett raised the intensity level to new heights that we didn't understand why other teams never could quite seem to match it. This Celtics team became part of us.
Last night, as the Celtics were in the final stages of losing Game 7 to Miami, I had a strange epiphany. Most of the time the Celtics losing Game 7 of a series in which they led 3-2 and had a chance to close out their opponents at home (and subsequently no-showed at said game when I was in attendance) would send me into a deep depression for weeks where I would disappear from society, grow a beard, and start drinking milk on the sidewalk during hot summer days. But the amazing thing is, I wasn't sad, at least not for the conventional reason of "My team lost a huge game that would have gotten them to their respective sport's championship round." I was able to come to grips pretty quickly with the fact that the Celtics older legs finally ran out of gas and LeBron James is really good at basketball. Instead, I was sad because that was the last time that the Celtics' New Big Three would compete for a championship. It was the last chance for three players who forever changed the fortunes of the franchise to go to the NBA Finals together. Ray Allen's post-game press conference said it all.(Hold on, I'm in a glass case of emotion. And yes, that's two Anchorman references in one paragraph. Don't act like you're not impressed.) This was it, their last stand, their swan song, and even though they couldn't put away the Heat, they still showed the heart of a champion.
Considering all they've already done, that was more than enough for me.
Thank you Celtics.
