Celtics run away from Mavericks, secure a record 18th NBA championship

Pritchard had made little impact in the series, save for a similar heave in Game 2. When he stepped into his latest prayer, the TD Garden crowd rose in anticipation and then roared its approval. The Celtics, certain now that the night and season belonged to them, ran away from the Mavericks with a 106-88 victory to secure their record-setting 18th championship, breaking a tie with the Lakers, their chief rival. The title is Boston’s first since 2008 following Finals losses in 2010 and 2022. Jaylen Brown was named Finals MVP.

“It was a whole team effort,” Brown said. “I’m grateful for every moment and every opportunity.”

Boston’s clinching victory capped one of the most dominant seasons in recent years. The Celtics went 80-21 overall — 64-18 in the regular season and 16-3 in the playoffs — and won the Eastern Conference by 14 games over the No. 2 seed New York Knicks. The Celtics’ breezy postseason run, which included an Eastern Conference finals sweep of the Indiana Pacers, was the fastest title chase since the Golden State Warriors went 16-1 in 2016-17. Their Game 4 blowout loss to the Mavericks on Friday was their only defeat in their final 12 games.

To put away Luka Doncic and the Mavericks for good, the Celtics turned to their textbook winning formula of balanced scoring and high-volume outside shooting and energetic defense. Jayson Tatum shook off a slow start to take over in the fourth quarter, finishing with a game-high 31 points to go with eight rebounds and 11 assists. Brown added 21 points, and Jrue Holiday chipped in 15.

“It means the world,” Tatum said. “It’s been a long time coming.”

Doncic finished with a team-high 28 points — many of them coming after the Celtics were already up big — and Mavericks guard Kyrie Irving was held in check again, finishing with 15 points on 5-for-16 shooting. Dallas had no reliable backup plan with its star guards struggling early, shooting just 11 for 37 (29.7 percent) from deep.

Pritchard’s backbreaking shot was his only basket of the night, but it gave Boston a 67-46 halftime lead. The Celtics, who never trailed, pushed their lead to 26 points in the third quarter before cruising to a victory against a Mavericks squad that simply couldn’t match their energy.

Even so, the TD Garden crowd spent much of the first half managing its collective anxiety: Tatum, who missed his first four shots, drew loud, relieved cheers when he finished a drive through contact and pounded his chest with both hands midway through the second quarter. After a dry spell to open the fourth quarter, Brown found a cutting Kristaps Porzingis, who returned after missing two games with an ankle injury, for a thunderous dunk that brought the building to its feet. Tatum and Brown each heard “MVP” chants as Boston put the finishing touches on its victory.

Despite their gaudy record and strong finish, the Celtics were never fawned over quite like super teams of the past. There were some obvious explanations: They lacked an all-time icon such as Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal or Stephen Curry; they benefited from the postseason injury absences of Miami’s Jimmy Butler, Cleveland’s Donovan Mitchell and Indiana’s Tyrese Haliburton; and they spent much of this season trying to escape the shadow cast by their previous playoff disappointments.

Regardless of the competition, Boston returned as a better, deeper, more focused and more disciplined team than the group that blew a 2-1 lead in the 2022 Finals to the Warriors and fell into a 3-0 hole in the 2023 Eastern Conference finals against the Miami Heat.

Thanks to the offseason additions of Porzingis and Holiday, Celtics President Brad Stevens assembled the NBA’s best collection of talent and Coach Joe Mazzulla oversaw a complete team, filled with complete players, that started 11-2 and never looked back. Boston ranked first on offense and second on defense in the regular season, then ranked fifth on offense and third on defense in the playoffs entering Monday. Defying their lasting reputation for blown leads and late-game misadventures, the Celtics went 21-12 in regular season games that were within five points in the final five minutes and 6-0 in such games during the playoffs.

“From our experiences over the past couple of years, the thing that we’ve really gotten a lot better at is not relaxing, not being complacent,” Tatum said. “From game to game or series to series, we always want more.”

The tightly wound Mazzulla successfully pushed Tatum and Brown to take better care of the ball and to trust his offensive philosophy, which relied heavily on catch-and-shoot three-pointers. Remarkably, eight different Celtics players made at least 100 three-pointers this season. On defense, the Celtics’ versatility was their calling card; they used an aggressive, switching scheme to make life difficult for opposing perimeter stars such as Doncic and Irving. Porzingis’s arrival helped shore up their interior defense and rim protection while keeping the miles off veteran center Al Horford.

“A coach’s greatest gift is a group of guys that want to be coached, want to be led and empower themselves,” Mazzulla said. “You can’t be a good coach if your players don’t let you. Everything starts with them, their ability to buy in, their ability to execute the things. As a staff, we’re grateful. We talk about it every day.”

Boston’s long-awaited championship finally completed a narrative arc that began with then-Celtics president Danny Ainge’s 2013 blockbuster trade of Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce to the Brooklyn Nets for a package of role players, future first-round picks and pick swaps. By parting with two of the faces of their 2008 title team, Boston was able to secure draft picks it used to acquire the two faces of this year’s title team: Brown in 2016 and Tatum in 2017.

The full-circle moment was only possible after some painful moments and countless reinventions. Boston hired Stevens from Butler University to guide the rebuilding effort, and he won only 25 games in his first season. The Celtics gradually climbed up the standings, but they cycled through countless stars — Isaiah Thomas, Irving, Kemba Walker and Gordon Hayward, among them — as Tatum and Brown matured.

Brown recalled a 2017 vacation in Spain when he received a 4 a.m. phone call from Ainge.

“Don’t ask me why I was up,” he said. “Danny asked me, ‘How do you feel about Jayson Tatum?’ I remember I played with him at the Top 100 camp. He was my roommate at [Kevin Durant’s] elite camp. We played on the same team in so many different [high school games]. At the Under Armour all-American game, we were roommates again. I had a lot of experiences with him. There was a lot of respect. I said, ‘I think it’s a great choice.’ Fast forward from there, we’ve been winning ever since.”

As the prominent faces around them came and went, a throughline emerged for Tatum and Brown: Boston was good enough to make deep playoff runs but not great enough to win it all. The Celtics reached the East finals in six of the past eight seasons, but they advanced to the Finals just once before this year and crumpled on the championship stage against Curry, Draymond Green and Klay Thompson.

Hitting the wall repeatedly led to Ainge’s exit and Stevens’s promotion from coach to president in 2021. When Stevens’s coaching successor, Ime Udoka, was fired in 2023 following an improper relationship with a female co-worker, Boston turned to the 35-year-old Mazzulla, who was only a few years removed from coaching in the G League.

As the personnel changes and off-court drama unfolded around them, Tatum and Brown blossomed into all-NBA players and the Celtics resisted calls to break up their star wing duo. In a series of brilliant trades, Stevens acquired Horford, Derrick White, Porzingis and Holiday to build an experienced two-way team around his two-way star forwards and load up for revenge after a humiliating season-ending loss to the Heat last year in Game 7 of the East finals.

“Falling short on your home floor, it definitely hurt,” Brown said. “It was embarrassing. It drove me all summer, drove me crazy.”

Sure enough, the Celtics channeled those painful memories into eight months of beatdowns, erasing any doubts that they were the league’s best team this season.

“With the Celtics, everybody knows we only hang up championship banners [in the TD Garden rafters],” Tatum said. “It’s been a while since we’ve won one. … You [media] guys will probably say we didn’t play anybody to get here. So we’ll just have to do it again next year.”