Good morning. Let’s basketball.

The Artist In His Studio; Rembrandt; 1628

The Boston Celtics are NBA champions. There was not, in fact, something intrinsically lacking in a team led by Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown. There was no missing je ne sais quoi. Joe Mazzulla wasn’t an albatross despite his youth and eccentricity.

(Every team should get to win the ‘chip at home.)

What this team became was a fantastic core of talented two-way players that received an infusion of Jrue Holiday — one of our most humble and steady two-way players — and Kristaps Porzingis — a somewhat erratic and occasionally spectacular two-way player. That’s a helluva program to build some scratch: a team with a legitimate superstar in Tatum, a star in Brown, and like three highly-worthy championship-grade third bananas (Holiday, Porzingis and the new local legend Derrick White), plus everyone’s favorite big brother Al Horford. For good measure, throw in Sam “Dunkin’ Robinson” Hauser and Peyton Pritchard, the human buzzer beater.

I can’t believe he did this s—t again in the NBA Finals, especially after the Mavericks bled out the clock at the end of the first quarter with no attempt.

You know that I’m not a Celtics fan, per se. But I leapt to my feet. What a moment.

The game was full of these: moments where it began to set in that the Mavericks simply were not good enough consistently enough to deny a fantastic team their hard-earned trophy.

Stephen A. Smith’s nonsensical halftime rant aside, Dallas didn’t give this to Boston. They simply didn’t have enough on either end to counter what the Celtics did. Boston’s defense again shut off the tap to the Mavericks’ deep shooting by blanketing Kyrie Irving, usually with Holiday, and forcing Luka to look to score instead of spraying the ball out. Brown took the Doncic assignment as a personal crucible, for better or worse, denying him the ball in the halfcourt when possible. Josh Green went 4/6 from deep; the rest of the Mavericks were 7/31. None of them drew many fouls.

It’s basically impossible to beat the Celtics scoring less than 100 points on them. Boston held the Mavericks under 100 in four of the five games of the Finals. And so there you have it.

The Mavericks may be back. It’s hard to guarantee anything like that considering a different franchise has won the West in each of the past five seasons. But Luka is a generational superstar, Kyrie has heretofore been a fantastic partner for him, and Dereck Lively II is a strong building block. They don’t have many roster cards to play having used their future picks to land Kyrie, P.J. Washington and Daniel Gafford. But Nico Harrison has shown a propensity for creativity and a dedication to finding undervalued complements to Luka on the market. They may be back, certainly if Luka has anything to do with it.

The Celtics are a surer bet given how thoroughly they dominated the East and the fact that both Tatum and Brown — who, again, both play exceptionally well on both ends of the floor — are reaching their prime and will be Celtics as long as this is working. Think about this: the most important Celtic not under contract next year is Luke Kornet. He only played garbage time in the Finals. Horford and White have another year on their contracts; the latter will almost assuredly get an extension during the champagne supernova to come this week. Brown signed the biggest NBA contract ever last summer; Tatum will sign the new biggest NBA contract ever in a month. Porzingis has two more years left — that was a great extension decision by Brad Stevens following the trade last summer, a gutsy move that paid off by avoiding a bidding war and a big question mark this summer — and Holiday signed a long-term extension during the season. The core is set. Eventually replacing Horford, who is 38 and occasionally shows it, is important. But not now. The Celtics can run this back and be title favorites again.

Banner 19 is sounding pretty good fresh off the glow of Banner 18.

Great teams win championships. This is one of the best designed, best performing teams of the past five years, and this championship is well deserved.

Time For My Parade

On April 20, the morning the NBA playoffs officially began, I predicted Celtics over Mavericks in five with Jaylen Brown winning Finals MVP. You don’t have to like me, but you have to respect me.

(Please like me, though. I starve for positive acknowledgement.)

Can We Also List The Sixers As Losers Of This Finals?

The Philadelphia 76ers might be my favorite current Eastern Conference team. I unabashedly adore Joel Embiid as an NBA personality. You, a fair-minded reader of this newsletter, know this.

However,

Just a brutal series of events leading to this Celtics championship for the good people of the Delaware Valley. Get ‘em next year.

I Would Like To Apologize To The People Of The Delaware Valley

That was all unnecessary, and I regret it.

That’s The Season

The 2023-24 NBA season is officially in the books. Huh, the Lakers and Celtics will hang banners. Never heard that one before. Here’s what’s cruising through your inbox for the next few months.

We’ll occasionally touch on WNBA matters. I just cannot with the pearl-clutching around Caitlin Clark getting treated like a particularly high-profile rookie by her rivals, so don’t expect many takes there. I’m also, like, really off of that social media narcotic in a legitimate way for the first time in about 15 or so years. So I’m missing a lot of the debate. Thankfully. But as I consume WNBA games and conversation, I’ll check in on that here and there.

The NBA Draft is in two weeks. The draft itself lacks star power, but there are about a dozen desperate teams that could use the draft as a canvas to express their fears and anxieties in the form of trades. Can’t wait. We’ll react to everything that happens.

In parallel and in the wake of the draft will be free agency. We may get some extension news over the next couple of weeks, and then around June 30 we should see a lot of action, perhaps especially in the world of trades. The Sixers will thankfully be back in our lives! Perhaps at the center of our lives!

The Lakers may hire a head coach. We’ll see.

The last-chance Olympic qualifying tournaments run July 2-7. Lots of NBA players could be involved in these tournaments. We should get clarity within the next two weeks who will play and who won’t. Teams in these last-chance qualifiers include Slovenia (Luka), Spain, Lithuania (Sabonis), Greece (Giannis), Bahamas (DominAyton and Buddy), Finland (Markkanen), Latvia (I don’t think Porzingis is going to play), Philippines (Clarkson), Dominican Republic (KAT), Italy, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Croatia and more. Four teams will make it to the Olympics out of these tournaments … including only one of the Greeks, the Slovenes and the Dominicans. (Or maybe zero of them!) This is going to be an intense week of competition.

The Olympic 5x5 basketball tournaments begin on July 27 (men’s) and July 28 (women’s). The men’s and women’s knockout rounds will alternate beginning with the dudes on August 6. The 3x3 tournaments will start on July 30 and wrap up August 5.

Maybe we’ll get a nice, long trade saga over the rest of August and September to pair with our WNBA stretch run.

We’ll be here, in your inbox, all the way.

Thank You Thank You Thank You for supporting Good Morning It’s Basketball, and be excellent to each other.