If the Lakers were the 80s personified, then the Celtics were the foundation and the first few floors of NBA history. They were run by Red Auerbach, who had been a fixture in the league from its inception. He had won fourteen championships by this point in time\u2014nine as a coach and five as a general manager. They wore uniforms that were barely distinguishable from the ones that the team was wearing when Red was hired to coach them more than thirty years earlier. Their arena was a relic\u2014a cramped relic painted mostly yellow, without air conditioning, with seats that were jammed together and placed behind columns and every one of them had been occupied for every single game the Celtics played for the past three seasons.<\/p>\n
The Celtics played on a parquet court that had been trod by the league\u2019s legends going back to the first year after World War II. It was a scarred and uneven surface that matched the tough and gritty character of the arena built around it.<\/p>\n
The Celtics played in Boston\u2014a crowded city where the past was present everywhere, where landmarks from the beginning of the nation were part of the fabric of everyday life, a city somehow nicknamed \u2018Beantown.\u2019 It had everything that L.A. lacked\u2014history, tradition, cultural institutions\u2014and it was hopelessly, helplessly uncool.<\/p>\n
The 1984 Finals were a culture clash as well as a basketball contest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If the Lakers were the 80s personified, then the Celtics were the foundation and the first few floors…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":821130,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[214976,355,99],"class_list":["post-821129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-boston-celtics-discussion","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/821129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=821129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/821129\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/821130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=821129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=821129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=821129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}