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On Monday evening, superstar Jayson Tatum and the Boston Celtics broke through and won their first NBA championship since the Bush administration with a resounding home victory over Luka Doncic and the Dallas Mavericks in Game 5 of the 2024 NBA Finals. The Celtics controlled this series from start to finish with a lone slipup in Game 4 in Dallas, and Tatum narrowly missed out on winning the Finals MVP award, with that honor instead going to teammate Jaylen Brown.
Perhaps the scariest part about these Celtics for the rest of the NBA is the fact that their best two players–Tatum and Brown–are 26 and 27 years old respectively, meaning they are theoretically just now entering the prime years of their career and could continue to produce at this level for many seasons to come.
This being the case, it should come as no surprise that the Celtics are the clear favorites for next season to once again represent the Eastern Conference in the NBA Finals with +125 odds. Behind the Celtics are the Milwaukee Bucks at +400, while the Philadelphia 76ers and New York Knicks sit behind them at +700 and +750 odds, respectively.
Next season, the Celtics figure to have their entire starting lineup of Tatum, Brown, Derrick White, Jrue Holiday, and Kristaps Porzingis back in the fray, as Holiday signed an extension with the franchise shortly before the playoffs started, and White is expected to sign a lucrative contract extension this offseason. That group of course was far and away the best unit in the NBA this season and will have a chance to run it back before the financial situation gets a bit more dicey moving past the 2024-25 season.
Can anyone challenge the Celtics?
Every metric and analytical data point would suggest that this 2023-24 Celtics team is one of the best teams to ever grace a basketball court. Throughout the season, no one else could keep up with Boston's lethal combination of defense, three-point shooting, size, and athleticism. The Celtics often functioned as a chameleon, able to win games in a variety of different ways and being adaptable to an array of different play styles. All five players in their starting lineup are elite defenders, elite shooters, capable if not very good playmakers, and can put the ball on the floor and create their own shot. No other starting lineup in the league has more than three players who check all of those boxes, and most don't even have more than one.
That being said, the team that would figure to have the best chance to at least stay competitive with the Celtics would be the Denver Nuggets, whose star Nikola Jokic is without a doubt the best player on Planet Earth and could theoretically expose the one “weak link,” if one exists, in the Celtics' defense, which is their interior defense.
However, even if Jokic played up to his generational capabilities, he would still need a lot of help from his inconsistent supporting cast to truly give the Celtics a run for their money, and even that might not be enough.
