With three more wins over the Golden State Warriors, the Boston Celtics will officially re-take the lead for most championships won by a single franchise (18).
Right now, after 2020, they are tied with the Lakers at 17 — but there is a growing sense that will change soon. This is why, in a chat with ESPN, former Lakers big man Mychal Thompson echoed his support for the Warriors.
“Dr. Buss always would say losing is bad enough but losing to the Celtics was not tolerable,” says Mychal Thompson, who won two titles in LA including one over Boston in the 1987 Finals.
“We are all Warriors fans now,” he said. “They have to do us a favor and keep us tied with Boston. We can’t let them get to 18 before us.”
The longtime rivalry has been told in a long string of books, movies, Broadway plays and, most recently, the HBO series “Winning Time,” which featured some dramatized trash talk between Buss and Celtics’ legend Red Auerbach. This Finals, though, is just an example of the many proxy battles that have been fought between the two sides over the years.
It has been some time since the Lakers and Celtics met in the postseason. In fact, since 2010, the teams have only made the Finals twice. Still, their rivalry persists.
On opposite ends of the country, with similar levels of success and greatness in their history, the Celtics and Lakers continue to battle each other in a sort of cold war. If Boston wins these Finals against Golden State, it will put them back on top of the trophy count and back on the minds of every Lakers fan.
These Finals will have implications that stretch beyond the two teams involved in this series. In fact, the outcome of this matchup could mark some huge changes for the entire league soon enough.
