Why there’s more than just a title at stake

Inside the Auerbach Center, the Boston Celtics’ new training facility, the team installed two championship signs to match the ones they have at their stadium seven miles down Mass Pike.

To say that those 17 signs are sacrosanct to the organization might be an understatement. So why not have as many duplicates as possible? On a morning in the building last June, as team owner Wyc Grousbeck prepared to formally announce his decision to promote Brad Stevens to team president, the two men made a pact under those symbolic banners.

“We pledged to each other to win banner 18,” Grousbeck said, “or die trying.”

Banner 18. It’s the fashionable rallying cry for the NBA’s two legacy organizations: the Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers.

That championship fight, wrapped up in a decades-long rivalry, makes the Lakers a shadow opponent for the Celtics during these developing 2022 NBA Finals. Both teams are 17 and it’s a deep, high-stakes race to take the league’s all-time lead.

The Lakers have won six titles to the Celtics’ one since the turn of the century, closing the historical gap. When the Lakers won in 2020, they tied them for the first time since 1963 (the Minneapolis Lakers won six of the first eight titles in league history).

This season in Los Angeles, hopes were high that the acquisition of Russell Westbrook would see the Lakers add a No. 18 star to the center court logo, a driving force for the Buss family to fulfill their late patriarch’s dream.

“Dr. [Jerry] Buss’ goal was always to get past Boston,” says Laker great Earvin “Magic” Johnson, who led the Lakers to five of those championships. “The Lakers never want the Celtics to win.”

“Dr. Buss always said losing was bad enough, but losing to the Celtics was not tolerable,” says Mychal Thompson, who won two titles in Los Angeles, including one over Boston in the 1987 Finals.

“We’re 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 lifelong rivalry has been told in a long series of books, movies, Broadway plays and, most recently, in the HBO series “Winning Time,” which featured dramatized trash talk between Buss and Celtics legend Red Auerbach. This finale, however, is just one example of the many power battles that have been waged between the two sides over the years.

It has taken many shapes and forms. In the 1982 Eastern Conference Finals, for example, when the Philadelphia 76ers had Game 7 remaining in the Boston Garden, the crowd dropped its disappointment to chant “Beat LA” as encouragement to the 76ers and their upcoming Finals showdown. The Lakers won in six.

When Doc Rivers, who coached the Celtics to the 2008 title over the Lakers, joined the LA Clippers as team president and coach in 2013, he ordered Lakers championship banners covered during Clipper games at the then-shared Staples Center. It was part of a branding move intended to give the Clippers their own identity…with the added benefit of whitewashing the Lakers’ success.

It still continues today. Warriors coach Steve Kerr, who grew up a Lakers fan in Southern California, would like to help keep the Celtics stuck at 17.

“I grew up watching Magic and [Larry] Bird in the ’80s,” Kerr said. “I was literally sitting in the back row of the Forum when Kevin McHale took out Kurt Rambis and changed the series [in 1984].”

Warriors point guard Klay Thompson, Mychal’s son, feels the same desire.

“I was watching [Lakers vs. Celtics] in college, Game 7, at Staples Center, with my dad in 2010, and now it’s 12 years later and I get to play against the team I was rooting for,” Thompson said. “So life comes full circle, now I get to play against them in the Finals.”

There are countless such stories of the slights the sides have taken against each other over the years.

When former Lakers coach Pat Riley published his book “Show Time” in 1988, he put it this way: “The ‘Boston mystique’ encourages the lowest common denominator of fan behavior. It derives directly from Boston’s low-rent management attitudes. They are the Klingons of the NBA.”