E-Mail This Article to a Friend The Celtics’ history be damned — they’re no longer the NBA’s marquee team BY CHRISTOPHER YOUNG

The following information will likely be viewed as heresy or treason by noted basketball insiders like Bob Ryan, Peter May, Red Auerbach, and John Havlicek. The younger breed of hoop junkies, however, will greet the news with a comment along the lines of "Well, duh."

The Boston Celtics — winners of an unprecedented 16 NBA world championships and boasting 29 members of the Naismith Hall of Fame — are no longer the franchise that all other pro basketball organizations seek to emulate. No longer does any kind of aura or mystique surround the team; nor can the Celtics realistically be viewed as the benchmark team in the NBA’s illustrious 58-year history. The Boston Celtics are, for the most part, irrelevant in most fans’ eyes, and no more important than the Suns, Sonics, or Wizards.

That is, in the eyes of this generation of NBA fans. They see the Celtics as just another team; the premier organization in the league right now is the Los Angeles Lakers, hands down.

Oh, the stories that could be told about the glory days of the Boston Celtics. Once Auerbach was hired by owner John Y. Brown, the team almost immediately became an indomitable force in the fledgling league. The C’s won their first title in 1957. Beginning with the 1959-’60 season, the team won eight straight championships under the redhead’s tutelage, and two more in the late ’60s under player/coach Bill Russell. Those squads were legendary, boasting perennial MVPs such as Russell and Dave Cowens and Bob Cousy, and the majority of the franchise’s Hall of Fame inductees played during this celebrated period. Sure, those early years saw Boston dominate a league that consisted of only eight or nine teams through the mid-’60s. But it was clear that Auerbach was a wizard not only on the bench, but in his role as GM, where he always seemed to have a knack for collecting the best talent. Former Celtic Tommy Heinsohn (whom many of the team’s younger fans know only for his color commentary on the team’s TV broadcasts) took the coaching reins in 1970 upon Russell’s retirement, and he led the Green to a couple more titles in the mid-’70s — numbers 12 and 13 in your scorebook. After a few rough seasons late in that decade, Auerbach as GM shrewdly used the sixth overall pick in the 1978 draft to pick a junior — who under league rules at that time would not be able to join the NBA for another year — who turned out to be one of the greatest players in league history. Larry Bird, a 6-9 forward out of Indiana State, immediately paid dividends for the organization, leading the Celtics to NBA titles in 1981, 1984, and 1986. With Bird headlining the "Big Three" (which also included center Robert Parish and forward Kevin McHale) and getting significant backcourt help from Danny Ainge and Dennis Johnson, the Boston Celtics cemented their position as the league’s pre-eminent franchise with the 1985-’86 team, which with the addition of center Bill Walton was widely regarded as the best team ever.

Yes, those were heady days, and they elicit strong and pleasant memories for New England’s basketball fans. But if you’re under the age of 24 now — which is the NBA’s target audience — then you barely remember that last Celtics banner, and you likely have no memory of the team as a dominant force in the league. Tragically, injuries, bad luck, boneheaded front-office decisions, and poor drafting have all converged to make the Celtics just another team for the past dozen years. Starting in 1993, the Green had eight straight losing seasons, with the nadir being the 1996-’97 ML Carr–led squad that finished a dismal 15-67. Armed with two lottery picks that spring, the team missed out via the ping-pong balls on the top pick — franchise-turner Tim Duncan — and instead picked third (Chauncey Billups) and sixth (Ron Mercer). Those disappointing choices served as the precursor to the team’s impending coaching change, as Kentucky head coach Rick Pitino took the reins. We all know what happened after that, and only Pitino’s resignation in January 2001 and the promotion of long-time assistant Jim O’Brien briefly moved the Celtics back into the realm of respectability — culminating with the team’s Eastern Conference finals berth in 2002.

We mentioned bad luck, didn’t we? Many NBA observers would say that the Celtics benefited from plenty of good luck bestowed upon them by the basketball gods during their halcyon days. The Boston teams of the late ’50s and the ensuring decade were similar to the New York Yankees of today — seemingly blessed each season with an unending stream of talent, and always viewed as a presumed contender for league honors. Of course, when you win 11 championships in 13 seasons, the goodwill you develop is limited to your own fans, and the Celtics of those days, as a result of their never-ending league dominance, ultimately became (like the Pinstripers) one of the most hated organizations in all of sports.

All that good fortune disappeared irreversibly on June 19, 1986, during a week that initially promised to be one of the most celebrated in the Celtics’ long history of fortuity. The team, fresh off that 16th banner over the hated Lakers, had somehow parlayed the 1984 trade of Gerald Henderson to Seattle into a first-round pick two years later — which, thanks to the Sonics’ 31-51 finish, became the second slot overall. The rich get richer, indeed. Yet draftee Len Bias overdosed on cocaine in the wee hours of the morning two days later, and a young man’s promising career and the Celtics dynasty ended simultaneously. In the coming years, Bird would retire prematurely from his Hall of Fame career because of a bad back, McHale would also leave the game early because of foot problems, and the team’s 1987 number-one pick — local lad Reggie Lewis — would six years later also collapse and die under mysterious circumstances. The team has never been the same since.

The 18-year gap between titles is the longest that the Celtics franchise has ever gone. And given the fact that Ainge — now executive director of basketball operations — has blown up the team and appears to be starting from scratch, the prospects of another FleetCenter banner being raised anytime soon is downright laughable.

So if you’re in your mid-20s or younger, you do not view the Boston Celtics as one of the marquee teams of the league. That designation is now reserved for teams like the Spurs, Mavericks, T-Wolves, Rockets, and Kings.

And, of course, the Lakers.

The Lakers have not yet won as many championships as Boston, but for the generation currently watching the NBA, LA is the standard-bearer. By virtue of their celebrity players and enviable success (the team had won three straight titles before the Spurs took the 2003 championship), the Lakers reign supreme over all other pretenders. As they head into the Western Conference Finals as the prohibitive favorite to win their fourth O’Brien Trophy in five seasons, it is the Purple and Gold that have supplanted the Green and White in the NBA’s overall hierarchy.

The Lakers franchise was originally based in Minneapolis, and the team won five of the early NBA’s eight championships. Once they relocated to LA, in 1960, the Lakers had to wait a dozen years before the Wilt Chamberlain–led squad won its first West Coast title. The team won another in 1980 and then dominated the latter part of that decade behind the mercurial Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar et al., although they could only watch as the Chicago Bulls ruled the ’90s behind Michael Jordan. Since MJ’s retirement, the Lakers have taken over the league, and are on a collision course for the LA entity’s 10th championship season, and the franchise’s 15th overall as it closes in on Boston's mark of 16.

Who do you think will reach 17 first?

Now true, green-blooded Celtics fans will no doubt point to their team’s illustrious history and their era-dominance of the ’60s, but in terms of consistency over the last quarter-century, nobody matches the Lakers. The team has had but two losing seasons in the last 28 years, and has captured the gold in eight of those campaigns. The Celtics, on the other hand, have finished below .500 eight times during that same period, while raising only three banners since 1976. Between 1993 and 2001, the Green missed the playoffs in seven of those eight seasons, and two of the times the team did qualify for the post-season in the past decade (including this past season), it has been with a losing record.

What does this say about the two teams? It says that the Lakers have been better at picking coaches (Phil Jackson versus Rick Pitino?), at dealing (two former Celtics — Rick Fox and Brian Shaw — have starred for recent Laker teams), and at collecting talent (Shaq, Kobe, and this season, Karl Malone and Gary Payton). And the last time I looked, the Lakers were operating under the same salary-cap restrictions as every other team. Moreover, because of their consistent success, they rarely have high draft choices.

The Celtics’ good luck ran out a long time ago, but it’s the choices they’ve made in recent years that have cost them most dearly. Only Paul Pierce can be regarded as even a borderline superstar since Reggie Lewis’s passing, and even "The Truth" finds himself surrounded by imposters as the team approaches the upcoming draft. Meanwhile, the Lakers continue to fly high, embroiled in controversy on an annual basis but still emerging from the battlefield each June with the hardware held aloft.

Next stop for LA: championship number 15. They’re closing in on the Celtics’ league mark for NBA titles, but that’s about all these two teams have even remotely in common anymore.

"Sporting Eye" runs Mondays and Fridays at BostonPhoenix.com. Christopher Young can be reached at cyoung[a]phx.com