By Jimmy Golen - Associated Press Sports Writer
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Boston — Paul Pierce grew up in Los Angeles watching the Lakers play the Celtics for NBA titles. Now he’s the captain of the Boston team that is back in the finals for the first time since losing to the Lakers in 1987.
“As a kid, I hated the Celtics,” Pierce said Friday night after Boston eliminated Detroit to advance to the NBA finals and a matchup with the Lakers.
“I’m going back home to play against my team that I grew up watching. It’s a dream come true, man, just thinking about it. I think that rivalry really revolutionized the game of basketball, and now I’m a part of it.”
The Celtics have won an NBA-record 16 championships, the last of them over Houston in 1986 to interrupt a run in which Larry Bird and Magic Johnson faced each other in the finals three times in four years. Those are the series Kansas University product Pierce watched, and the ones that established the rivalry as one of the NBA’s best.
“To me, I think that’s what pretty much got me started in basketball, growing up in Los Angeles, watching the Lakers and the Celtics,” he said. “It’s ironic, just being a Celtic, growing up, now you’re playing against the Lakers in the finals.”
For the last two decades, though, the NBA’s most decorated franchise hasn’t been good enough to keep the rivalry’s intensity going.
While the Lakers beat the Celtics in 1987, won again against Detroit in ’88 and then added three more trophies in the Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal era, the Celtics have missed the playoffs entirely nine times from 1994-2007. Twice, the team all but tanked the season in the hopes of winning big in the draft lottery; twice it failed.
There was a time, in fact, when the Celtics legacy was a burden on the team. The constant reminders of the past finally forced Rick Pitino to the breaking point, with his memorable rant that Larry Bird, Kevin McHale and Robert Parish “aren’t walking through that door.”
But — cheerleaders aside — the new owners have embraced the history.
“The whole reason to buy this team was to be trustees for the past,” Wyc Grousbeck, one of the partners who bought the team in 2002 and named their company Banner 17, said Saturday. “We’re trustees of one of the great franchises in the history of sports, and we’re trying to extend the past. The legacy’s the whole idea.”