The Celtics aren’t the only NBA team raising a banner this week.
Boston will open the 2024-25 NBA season Tuesday by hosting the New York Knicks at TD Garden. Before the rivals tip off the new campaign, there’s one bit of business to tie up from last season: The C’s must raise their 18th championship banner to the rafters.
That alone should bring plenty of joy to fans of the Green. It has been 16 long years since the club last did some rearranging in the Garden. If Celtics fans want a little additional joy, though, they can look no further than their most recent adversary: the Dallas Mavericks.
The runner-up to Boston is getting ready for its season with sky-high expectations after getting close last season. However, the Mavs did a little decorating of their own this week ahead of their opener, raising a Western Conference champions banner to the rafters at American Airlines Center.
Dallas smartly did so in an empty arena, but the team curiously shared the endeavor to social media with the caption “Added another one to the rafters ⭐” with a video of the banner going up.
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It, um, didn’t go well for Dallas. Fans of the Celtics — and plenty of other teams, presumably, lined up to dunk on the first-place losers.
Among some of the replies and quote-tweets on X:
Hanging up conference finals 😭
“NBA Championship Losers”
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Dallas colts
Participation banners are great! Celebrate fielding a team
Sometimes the jokes write themselves
The entire United States military couldn’t force me to hang and then promote one of these banners if I owned a team.
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The fans aren’t the only ones who feel that way. The Celtics agree, as noted by Boston superstar Jayson Tatum, who made that point before the 2024 NBA Finals began.
“Ever since I’ve been in the NBA, especially with the Celtics, everybody knows we only hang up championship banners,” he said in a press conference in June.
” … If you want to be one of the greats to put on this uniform, every great before you won the championship, and that’s what we try to play for every single season. The expectations are obviously different here. It takes special players to be here and be a part of an environment like that.”
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Tatum and the rest of his Celtics teammates solidified themselves in that regard with their win over the Mavericks. They’ll get to celebrate it one final time Tuesday night before they set out to try to do it all over again.
Featured image via Peter Casey/Imagn Images
