On this day, Boston Celtics guard legends KC Jones and Bill Sharman were born, and Paul Pierce almost single-handedly beat the Nets in 2002.
On this day in Boston Celtics history, point guard legend KC Jones was born in 1932 in Taylor, Texas. Jones played his college ball with fellow Celtics legend Bill Russell at the University of San Francisco and was taken in the same draft class as Russell by the Celtics with the 13th overall pick of the 1956 NBA draft.
The Texan guard would go on to win eight titles with Boston, the only club he played for over a nine-season career in the NBA. He would average 7.4 points, 3.5 rebounds, and 4.3 assists per game with the Celtics. He would also win two titles with the team as a head coach in the 1980s.
Jones would be inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame as a player in 1989.
While he might be a very good head coach of the NBA’s most storied franchise, Boston Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla has a very long way to go to make the list of the best coaches to ever tote a clipboard in front of Boston’s bench, never mind across the other 29 teams of the Association.
Even the best head coaches of today’s game — with a single notable exception — would not make the cut of the greatest head coaches in NBA history according to Los Angeles Lakers legend Michael Cooper.
No, Miami Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra is not the exception Cooper was talking about.
Coop and the founder of the CLNS Media network, Nick Gelso, hashed out who those legendary head coaches are on the NBA G.O.A.T. list.
Two Celtics coaches and a former player who coached elsewhere make the list, but you will have to watch the clip embedded above to hear who else made Coop’s cut.
On this day, the Celtics traded for Bill Sharman, drafted Gene Conley and won their seventh title in 1964.
On this day in Boston Celtics history, shooting guard Bill Sharman was dealt to the Celtics in 1951 from the (then) Fort Wayne (now, Detroit) Pistons, who in turn had picked up Sharman early in the year in a dispersal draft from the now-defunct Washington Capitals.
Sharman, a native of Abilene, Texas, had played his college ball with the University of Southern California before being drafted by the Capitals in 1950 with the 17th overall pick of that year’s draft. Sharman would go on to play ten seasons for Boston, winning four championships and being elected to eight All-Star games (winning All-Star MVP in 1955) and seven All-NBA teams over that stretch.
He would retire as a player in 1961 to go into coaching and would become the first person in North American sports history to win titles as a player, coach, and executive.
From Ed Macauley and Bill Russell to Dave Cowens, Larry Bird, and Paul Pierce, the list of names to choose from is extensive.
Who are the top 10 Boston Celtics players of all time? Back in the early years, there was Ed Macauley and Bill Sharman, then in the dynasty years a plethora of options ranging from Bob Cousy, Bill Russell, Tom Heinsohn, Satch Sanders, KC Jones, and John Havlicek.
Later, you could pick from Dave Cowens, Paul Silas, and JoJo White in the 1970s, and Cedric Maxwell, Larry Bird, Robert Parish, and Kevin McHale in the 1980s. The 1990s had Antoine Walker and Paul Pierce, the latter of whom stuck around to win a title in the aughts with Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen.
Even with all that star power under the history of one franchise, you could still more names the list is so long, making the job done by ESPN’s Andrew Lopez, Tim Bontemps, and Ros Gold-Onwude on a recent episode of the “NBA Crosscourt” show all the more impressive.
Take a look at the clip embedded above to hear what names made their lists — and which ones did not.
On this day in Celtics history, Larry Bird won two prestigious media awards, and basketball inventor James Naismith published the sport’s original 13 rules.
On this day in Boston Celtics history, legendary small forward Larry Bird was honored with being awarded both Man of the Year by the Sporting News and Athlete of the Year by the Associated Press in 1987.
It was the first time in history that any athlete of any sport had won both awards at the same time in the same year. The honor for the Hick from French Lick (as Bird was sometimes called) happened at the apex of his prime years. It may even have been a bit of a jinx if you believe in that sort of thing.
The dual honor ended up being the first time in 5 seasons the Celtics did not make it to the NBA Finals in the Playoffs.
Yahoo Sports’ Ben Rohrbach named a metric designed specifically to measure Russell’s sort of greatness.
The greatest winner of all time, Boston Celtics Hall of Fame big man Bill Russell, had such a profound impact on the sport of basketball that Yahoo Sports’ Ben Rohrbach named a metric designed specifically to measure Russell’s sort of greatness.
Updating it for the second straight year since its creation in 2021, Rohrbach recently released the 2022 version of what he has dubbed the predictably-titled “Bill Russell Scale” to help us take stock of how greats across eras are currently stacking up against one another. “Russell’s accomplishments also do not fit neatly into a statistical box,” writes Rohrbach. “He was not an all-time great scorer, and PER fails to properly capture the impact he clearly had.”
“This is why setting him as the gold standard makes so much sense,” adds the Yahoo analyst — and with that, let’s see where Celtics alumni stack up in 2022.
It’s no coincidence this team has the most retired jersey numbers with 17 banners hanging alongside them as of Oct. 2022. https://t.co/Pr3nTuee7t
We might be biased, but we’re not too crazy about the update.
While some NBA media outlets are dialed into the 2022-23 NBA season for their annual exercise to fill the late September content desert that is ranking season, our sister site HoopsHype has its eyes on a bigger prize.
Drawing on the popular all-time NBA list released adjacent to the NBA’s version put together for the league’s 75th anniversary, HoopsHype has gone a step further and updated the list again for 2022. There’s quite a bit of change (including the absence of many Boston Celtics who made the last list), and to be frank, we are not fans of an all-time list that would see so much turnover a mere 365 days later.
Take a look for yourselves at the various Celtics greats who were omitted and where those who remain are ranked now, and let us know why we are wrong if you feel so compelled.
Can you name the players — and better yet, the seasons — Boston had a player named Finals MVP? https://t.co/cSQKtitGwp
It’s no coincidence this team has the most retired jersey numbers with 17 banners hanging alongside them.
There are no teams in the history of the NBA to have more titles than the Boston Celtics — at least not yet — so it makes sense there are no other franchises with more retired numbers to honor the players over the decades who earned and hung those banners.
In fact, there are no teams in any sport with more retired jersey numbers at 22 overall, a reflection of the excellence behind the Celtics mystique built by franchise architect Red Auerbach. From his signing with the team as coach and general manager onward, Boston became one of the premier teams of the greatest basketball league on the planet.
But who were the players for which those jerseys were retired after the latest addition of Hall of Fame big man Kevin Garnett? Let’s take a look at them all.
