It’s Time to Admit it: The 2008 Celtics Are The Most Overrated Team Ever
Kendrick Perkins, Rajon Rondo, Ray Allen, Kevin Garnett, and Paul Pierce (pictured left to right) with the 2008 Larry O’Brien trophy and the Finals MVP trophy.
Photo Credit: ESPN
The 2008 Boston Celtics will forever be remembered among Boston Sports fans as one of the best teams to ever grace a basketball court. This championship season marked a return to glory for the storied Boston Celtics, who had not won a championship since 1986 with the legendary core of Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Dennis Johnson, and Robert Parrish. On the surface, the case for the 2008 Celtics being one of the best teams seems pretty cut and dry. They built an absolutely stacked roster after they traded for Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett to team them up with Paul Pierce. They breezed through the regular season with a 66-16 record, the best in the NBA. They were one of the better defensive teams ever, finishing the regular season first in defensive rating, second in points allowed per game, first in effective field goal percentage allowed, and first in opponent turnover percentage, according to Basketball Reference. Kevin Garnett was named the 2008 Defensive Player of the Year. Tony Allen, Ray Allen, James Posey, and Rajon Rondo created a nightmare for guards and wings on the perimeter. They won a championship beating both LeBron and Kobe in the process. So how could they possibly be overrated?
Well, the reality that Boston fans seem to never admit, and a lesser-known fact about this Celtics team is that despite their incredible success in the regular season, they struggled mightily in the playoffs. They needed seven games in the first round to beat a 37-45 eighth-seeded Atlanta Hawks team. In the second round, they did beat LeBron James’s Cavs, but that’s just it: they only defeated LeBron when he had no supporting star player or roster around him that was good enough to win a championship. The Celtics still needed seven games to finish that job too, despite LeBron shooting just 35.5 percent from the field in that series. It then took them six games to beat the Detroit Pistons, whose core from their 2004 title run was on its last run together, and then another six games to beat Kobe and Pau Gasol’s Lakers in the finals. Winning the conference finals and finals in six games is much more respectable, but they still looked nothing like the dominant team that lost just 16 games in the regular season. The Celtics finished with a 16-10 record in the postseason, which stands to this day as the worst by a champion in NBA history.
Furthermore, the Celtics were hardly a dominant team on the offensive side of the ball. Despite having excellent scorers on the roster, they had trouble generating offense at times due to their lack of scoring depth coming off the bench. The result was an eleventh-place finish in points scored per game and tenth-place in offensive rating during the regular season. Although these results may not be too bad, offensive struggles did rear their ugly head at times during the playoffs as they averaged just 86.6 points per game in their playoff losses.
From the perspective of basketball fans, this team seemingly gets a lot more attention than other championship teams in recent history. They have reunions every so often and get talked about all the time because of the stars on their team. But for those who haven’t already, it’s time to move on. Several other teams around this time had more impressive runs as a core as well, and don’t boast about it nearly as much as this Celtics team has over the years. The 2004 Pistons made the Eastern Conference Finals six straight times from 2003-2008. The Spurs were a contending team throughout the entire 2000s and most of the 2010s, winning a championship just the year before the Celtics in 2007 and another one two years after the core of Pierce, Garnett, and Allen had fallen apart in 2014. The 2011 Mavs and 2019 Raptors had more impressive championship runs considering the competition they faced and the fact that they completed their playoff quests in fewer games. Let’s be honest, no sports team has ever milked one title more than the Celtics and their fanbase. Ever since Larry Bird’s last championship in the 1985-86 season, the 2008 team is their lone title since. Until they win another one, basketball fans outside of Boston are collectively exhausted from the coverage of this team.
