The Celtics are the prototype of a modern NBA champion

The new era is less about superstar talent — and more about optimizing under constraints.

The Boston Celtics just won their first NBA championship since 2008 — and as anyone born east of the Connecticut River will surely remind you, their 18th all-time, breaking a tie with the Lakers. Congratulations to the franchise¹, which shut up a lot of doubters² and made smart decisions from start to finish.

This was not a club that was endowed with a championship by good luck, or by being in a place like Los Angeles or South Beach that players love to take their talents to. Instead, all six of the Celtics’ best players were acquired via trade — or in the case of Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, via draft picks acquired by trade.

Most of the takes you’ll read in the coming days will be about the juxtaposition between Boston’s incredible season — they had the 5th-best point differential of all-time in going 64-18 in the regular season, and then went 16-3 in the playoffs — and the lack of respect they were sometimes accorded. The Celtics will still leave the trolls with a few crumbs to chew on — it wasn’t the hardest route to the title, against an Eastern Conference devastated by injury and a good-but-not-elite Mavericks team — and when the Celtics did lose in the playoffs, they lost big. They also weren’t exactly underdogs, having been listed as title co-favorites at the start of the year. (Although with the Celtics and co-favorite Nuggets at only +450 — for those of you who aren’t degenerate gamblers, that implies an 18 percent chance of winning the title — every team was sort of a long shot this year.)

Mostly what to expect, though, is that people will memory-hole their doubts about the Celtics. The majority (!) of voters on ESPN’s expert panel who picked the Mavericks — and none picked the Celtics in 5 or fewer games, even though that was considered an extremely plausible result by statistical projection systems — will hope you forget about that. Before long, they’ll forget they picked the Mavericks too.

Instead, as was the case with the Nuggets last year, this will look like an extremely natural championship trajectory, with the Celtics having a few near-misses and disappointments before maturing into form as their best players reached the middle of their careers.

But really, there have been quite a few of these Narrative Violations lately. Some of the smartest basketball nerds in the world were convinced that Nikola Jokic’s shit wouldn’t work in the playoffs. The conventional wisdom was that the 2015 Warriors were too small and too young, and that the 2019 Raptors all-in on Kawhi Leonard was too much of a wild gamble. To some extent, all of this is just overfitting on small sample sizes. Players like Steph Curry and Jokic had never won championships until they won them — but there had never been players like Curry or Jokic before. Even the rap that the Celtics were chokers in the playoffs was dubious. Tatum had won 52 career playoff games before entering the season — and 64 before entering the Finals — which is a hell of a lot for a guy who’s just 25.

Perhaps the best reason to have doubts about Boston heading into the Finals was that they didn’t have the best player in the series, a distinction that belonged to Luka Doncic. I’m not here to stan for Tatum — a player whom RAPTOR always liked but not loved — though his reputation probably suffers from being a great all-around player (including the overlooked categories of durability and compatibility with his teammates) rather than being dominant in any one area. Still, The Ringer’s rankings — which had Doncic as the 2nd best player in the league as of April and Tatum 7th — seem roughly correct. The Celtics won because they also had the league’s 25th (Brown), 39th (Kristaps Porzingis), 42nd (Derrick White³) and 47th (Jrue Holiday) best players, according to The Ringer, and the pieces fit well together.

The Celtics are likely to draw comparisons to the San Antonio Spurs dynasty and to both the Bad Boys Detroit Pistons and the 2004 Pistons — as teams that won the title as teams — but neither of those is exactly apt. The former underrates Tim Duncan, who very much was a superstar, while the latter underrates Tatum, who is a higher caliber of star than anyone on any of those Pistons teams. (Tatum finished 6th in MVP voting this year, while Isiah Thomas and Joe Dumars tied for 13th in 1990 and 17th in 1989.)

What surprised me to discover, though, is how rare it’s been in recent years for players who finished at the top of the MVP class to win the title. The player to win a title in his MVP-winning season was Curry in 2015 — although the list deserves a big asterisk, since Jokic should have won the MVP last year. But from 1980 through 2003, all but four NBA champions had a player who finished in the top 3 in the MVP voting. Now it’s happened just twice in the past eight seasons.

Again, some of this is happenstance — Giannis Antetokounmpo was 4th in MVP voting in 2021, but had won the hardware in 2019 and 2020; Leonard’s regular-season numbers were undermined by load management in 2019, and MVP voters didn’t quite know what to do with the Curry/Kevin Durant dyad.

But there are also structural factors at play. The NBA nominally introduced a salary cap before the 1984-85 season, but for years, there were enough loopholes to drive a Shaquille O'Neal-sized semi-truck through it; in 1998, Michael Jordan made $33 million dollars — more than the league’s ostensible $30 million salary cap! New rules are also making it harder to acquire two or three superstars and then surround them with (overpaid) complimentary talent; the Nuggets, for instance, were thinner than they were a year ago. Teams now need to be on the right side of the ledger on nearly every contract — as the Celtics were — or be willing to pay a very, very steep luxury tax bill.

You can see this by comparing the top team payroll in the league to the median team payroll. This ratio has now settled in at about 1.25-to-1, where it was over 2-to-1 as recently as 2006:

To be clear, spending top dollar is no guarantee of success — just ask the New York Knicks, who were the top payroll team for several of these seasons but haven’t hung a title banner above MSG since 1973. Nevertheless, it’s getting harder to both have a superstar talent or two and surround them with a core of winning role players. The very best players in the league were once underpaid — worth considerably more than the maximum salary — but that’s becoming less true under the league’s new-ish supermax rules, which pay veteran stars something at least approaching their market salaries.

Super-duper-teams along the lines of the Bulls or Warriors dynasties aren’t entirely out of the question — the Oklahoma City Thunder, in particular, have a shot if everything breaks right — but even then, their windows are likely to be shorter. You probably need to have at least one superstar who’s still on a rookie-scale contract — and players at that stage of their careers often do underperform in the playoffs — or otherwise you’ll face some tough choices.

A lot of NBA conventional wisdom is still calibrated to the league as it existed in the 1980s and 1990s — when middle-aged guys like me came of age — and it was less punitive to pay a max contract. I wouldn’t quite say the 2024 Celtics are the new normal — that’s disrespectful to a team that’s the best champion since the 2015/2017/2018 Warriors. But you’re going to see more of this: either well-rounded teams like the Celtics that won a title despite not having a true blue-chip superstar, or teams like the Nuggets that have one superstar but only one.

And that’s probably good for the sport. The bar is set lower for championship contention when there’s not a team like the 80’s Celtics, 80’s Lakers, 90’s Bulls, 00’s Lakers or 2010’s Warriors to leap over. That encourages smart risk-taking — like totally overhauling your starting lineup even when you were already pretty good, as the Celtics did. Boston’s wheeling-and-dealing — under Danny Ainge and then Brad Stevens — finally paid off, but it’s one of the most well-deserved championships in years.

1. Particularly assistant general manager Mike Zarren, who I overlapped with at U of C.

2. For the record, I was a believer.

3. Underrated; this is the one ranking I strongly quibble with.