Question: What do the 1962, 1969, 1984 and this year’s NBA Finals have in common?
Answer: The Boston Celtics—and absolutely nothing else.
The ’62, ’69, and ’84 Finals were among the most entertaining and heart-pounding in NBA history. The Celtics beat the Los Angeles Lakers in seven games in all three series.
This year’s finals, not so much. Barring a miraculous comeback by the Dallas Mavericks, the Celtics will win the championship in a series that will be remembered mostly for how one-sided it was.
The Celtics can be forgiven for occasionally playing in a dud of a series because they’ve played in so many Finals. Their 23 appearances are only topped by the Lakers who have played in 32.
The 1962 series was in the middle of the Celtics’ extraordinary run of 11 titles in 13 seasons — and was at the height of Bill Russell’s talents. Russell and the Lakers’ Elgin Baylor were the story of the series. In the seven games, Russell pulled down 189 rebounds—an average of 27 per game. In game 7, he grabbed 40 boards. Baylor scored a total of 284 points—an average of 40.5 per game—and scored 61 points in game 5.
The Lakers would have won game 7 and the series if Frank Selvy’s shot with seconds to go had gone in.
The 1969 final was a different story with the same result. The Lakers, with Baylor, Jerry West and Wilt Chamberlain were heavy favorites to beat the aging Celtics who had finished fourth in the Eastern Division. Lakers’ owner Jack Kent Cooke was so confident his team would win game 7 he had thousands of balloons with “World Champion Lakers” printed on them hung from the rafters.
According to a history of the game on NBA.com, Cooke had staff place flyers on every seat that stated “when, not if, the Lakers win the title balloons will be released from the rafters…The Celtics circulated one of the flyers in their locker room. West was furious at the sight of the hanging balloons.”
But luck was with the Celtics. With just over a minute to play and Boston winning 103-102, a Lakers player knocked the ball out of John Havlicek’s hands and it caromed right to the Celtics’ Don Nelson near the foul line. Nelson’s jumper hit off the back of the rim and went straight up, only to come straight down into the basket.
Years later Red Auerbach, who was the Celtics general manager in 1969, told the Los Angeles Times: “I’ll always remember those balloons and that shot, too. That made it more special than all the other titles we won.”
For sheer drama—on and off the court—the 1984 Finals were arguably the most exciting and taut in NBA history. At the center of the drama and action were Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, who were at the peak of their rivalry and their skills.
Having won the first game and leading late in game 2, the Lakers were poised to go up 2-0 in the series. But with 33 seconds to go and his team trailing by 2 points, Gerald Henderson intercepted an errant pass by James Worthy and laid the ball in to tie the game. For reasons unknown, Johnson dribbled out the final seconds sending the game to overtime. The Celtics won in OT to tie the series 1-1.
Worthy told the Basketball Network in 2023 that his pass still haunts him: “Magic Johnson grabbed it and threw it to me. I was nervous as a scarecrow because here we are 13 seconds away from winning Game 2. I'm in the backcourt, but I need to get rid of it.”
Lakers coach Pat Riley told Sports Illustrated: “I could see the seams of the ball like it was spinning in slow motion, but I couldn't do anything about it.”
The Celtics were blown out 137-104 in game 3, prompting angry words from Bird. As quoted in Dan Shaughnessy’s book “Wish it Lasted Forever,” Bird said, “We got some great players on this team, but we don’t have the players with the heart sometimes that we need.”
He added: “We played like sissies.”
Bird’s teammate, Kevin McHale was anything but a sissy in game 4—and in one play he changed the course of the series.
With the Celtics trailing 76-70 and coach K.C. Jones imploring his team to not allow layups, McHale clotheslined the Lakers’ Kurt Rambis as he was streaking for what looked like a certain layup.
The play energized the Celtics. “From that point on, you could just feel the whole game turn,” McHale said in a 2017 ESPN documentary on the Celtics/Lakers rivalry. The Celtics went on to win the game and to tie the series at 2-2.
McHale apparently had only one regret about the incident: In 2021 on the Cedric Maxwell Podcast, he said: “My only regret, honestly, is that it wasn't Worthy or Magic or someone better. It just happened to be Kurt Rambis. I was just like, no layups. Whatever happens, there’s not going to be a layup.”
The Celtics won game 5 and when the Lakers took game 6, things got weird. After Commissioner David Stern was quoted as telling a fan that the cash-strapped league needed the financial windfall that a game 7 would provide, Bird alleged that Stern has somehow rigged the game. “When the commissioner makes a statement like that to a fan, you know it's going to be tough,” he said.
Did the refs tilt the court in favor of the Lakers? Hardly. The Celtics had 35 free-throw attempts to the Lakers’ 17.
The Celtics won game 7, 111-102, despite a furious fourth-quarter comeback by the Lakers. Fittingly for this crazy series, Celtics fans stormed the court and ripped Kareem Abdul-Jabbar goggles off his head, and Rambis was sued for allegedly punching a fan in the nose.
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