Banner # 18

Here's Shank on the 2023 - 2024 NBA Champions:

A torch has been passed: Jaylen Brown, Jayson Tatum join the champions club and help Celtics raise Banner 18

Light up a Hoyo de Monterrey in honor of Red Auerbach and get ready for another parade. Playing on their fabled parquet floor, with banners flapping high above courtside, the Celtics won their NBA-best 18th championship Monday with a 106-88, NBA Finals Game 5 victory over the Dallas Mavericks.

Order is restored to the pro basketball universe. From the 1950s through the ‘80s, Boston’s Green Team ruled the National Basketball Association. The torch has been passed to a new generation of champions: Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown.

“It’s time for us to graduate,” Brown told Tatum before Game 5.

When it was over, Brown received the Bill Russell Finals MVP Trophy.

“It was a full team effort and Jayson Tatum was with me the whole way," said Brown.

One Win Away

Here's Shank's column after the Boston Celtics win Game 3 of the NBA Finals Wednesday night:

Game 3 was harder than it should have been, but Banner 18 is an inevitability for the Celtics

DALLAS — You can relax, Boston. It might happen here Friday, or maybe you’ll have to wait until Monday on Causeway Street, but it’s inevitable. The Celtics are going to raise their 18th championship banner.

Just try not to worry about your team letting a 21-point fourth-quarter lead dwindle to one in what seemed the blink of an eye.

It wasn’t as easy as it should have been, but the Celtics beat the Mavs again. Playing at American Airlines Center on Wednesday without tree-top Kristaps Porzingis, the Green Team took charge early in the fourth quarter, watched their big lead fizzle, then prevailed for a third straight game. The Celts rode the broad shoulders of the two Jays (Tatum had 31, Brown 30) to a 106-99 victory, taking a definitive 3-0 series lead in the NBA Finals.

Celtics Wrapup - II

Shank's been banging out the columns over the past week or so, with images of victory cigars after the Boston Celtics take a 2-0 series lead, and The Cooz wants another banner in the rafters, presumably so all of The Cooz's banners have some company!

Celtics Wrapup

With Shank firmly on the Boston Celtics bandwagon, he comes out with a bunch of columns the past couple of days. The first one lets us know it's good for us and the NBA, the second column is a Larry Bird Sighting^TM, which includes a Bruce Springsteen sighting / anecdote that I'll gladly ignore, and another column from Game 1, which Shank takes to all but declare an early winner.

I don't think that's good karma, but there it is.

DHL Dan CCXII - End The Drought

Shank's thirsting for a championship, folks!

It’s the Celtics’ time to end our championship drought, and other thoughts

ROME — Picked-up pieces while asking Italians what they think of Giuseppe Mazzulla’s work in the first three rounds of the NBA playoffs …

▪ We’re due for another professional sports championship, are we not?

I mean, it’s been a whole five years and four months since guys named Brady and Belichick hoisted their sixth Lombardi Trophy after a 13-3 victory over the Rams in Atlanta.

That was New England’s 12th men’s major sports championship of this century. Good times never seemed so good. The Red Sox won four World Series from 2004-18, the Celtics acquired Kevin Garnett and then won Banner No. 17 in 2008, and the Bruins in 2011 won their first Stanley Cup since 1972, beating Vancouver in seven games.

This means that between February of 2005 (Patriots over Eagles in Jacksonville), and June of 2011 (Bruins in Vancouver), each of our four major men’s professional teams won a championship.

Rev up those duck boats!

Bill Walton, RIP

Legendary Boston Celtics player Bill Walton passed on earlier this week after a battle with cancer. Shank does the honors and pays tribute:

Bill Walton’s time in Boston was brief but unforgettable, and we were lucky to have him

The memories and stories started pouring in as soon as the news broke.

Everyone remotely connected to the 1985-86 Celtics has a Bill Walton memory. Invariably, those stories are personal. And all of us were shocked Monday when it was learned that Walton had died in California at the age of 71.

No player ever loved playing for the Celtics more than Walton. And it’s cruel and ironic that Bill would pass as the team is on to another appearance in the NBA Finals, which would mean a chance to win an NBA-record 18th banner.

My friend Rich Johnson, longtime curator of the New England Sports Museum and — like Walton — someone with a lifelong stutter, weighed in online, sending out a recording of the Grateful Dead’s “He’s Gone,” while writing, “Listening while wiping away tears. His personal kindness to me was life changing.”

Bill touched a lot of lives in his short stint in Boston, and those of us lucky enough to have known him share the same emotions.