Boston Celtics

▪ American basketball team

      American professional basketball team based in Boston, Mass. One of the most successful franchises in sports history, the Celtics won 11 of 13 National Basketball Association (NBA) championships from 1957 to 1969. Overall, they have won 17 NBA titles.

      Founded in Boston in 1946 by Walter Brown, the Celtics were charter members of the Basketball Association of America, a forerunner of the NBA. At the time of the team's founding, Brown also managed the Boston Garden, on whose distinctive parquet court the green-and-white-clad Celtics thrived until the franchise moved to a new arena in 1995–96.

  The Celtics' run as a sports dynasty began in the mid-1950s under coach (later general manager and president) Red Auerbach (Auerbach, Red), remembered for his “victory cigars.” With a lineup of Hall of Famers that included Frank Ramsey, Bill Sharman (Sharman, Bill), ball-handling wizard Bob Cousy (Cousy, Bob), Tom Heinsohn, dominating centre Bill Russell (Russell, Bill) (five times the league's Most Valuable Player), and later Sam Jones, K.C. Jones, and John Havlicek (Havlicek, John), the ‘‘Celts " won eight consecutive NBA titles between 1958–59 and 1965–66 and triumphed again in 1967–68 and 1968–69. The matchups between Russell (player-coach, 1966–69) and Wilt Chamberlain (Chamberlain, Wilt), first as a Philadelphia 76er and then with the Los Angeles Lakers, were at the centre of some of the most dramatic games in NBA play-off history.

      Havlicek was still a key contributor, along with Dave Cowens, Paul Silas, and Jo Jo White, on teams that won titles in 1973–74 and 1975–76. In the 1980s the NBA reached new levels of popularity with the excitement generated by the supremacy battle between the Lakers led by Magic Johnson (Johnson, Magic) and a Celtics team—led by Larry Bird (Bird, Larry) (the NBA's Most Valuable Player 1984–86), Robert Parish, Kevin McHale, and Dennis Johnson—that won championships in 1980–81, 1983–84, and 1985–86.

      In the mid-1990s the Celtics experienced the first prolonged play-off drought—six straight years beginning with the 1995–96 season—in the franchise's history. When the Celtics returned to the play-offs, they often lost in the early rounds. This changed during the 2007–08 season when the Celtics made the greatest single-season turnaround in NBA history—finishing with the league's best record and posting a 42-win improvement after the off-season addition of superstars Kevin Garnett (Garnett, Kevin) and Ray Allen to a team that already included perennial All-Star Paul Pierce. They advanced to the NBA finals, where they defeated the rival Lakers for a ninth time and won the 17th title in franchise history.

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