The Boston Celtics are the best team in the NBA right now. Their league-best 21-5 record is a clear testament to this fact.

The Celtics have been so good so far this season that former Boston champ Brian Scalabrine could not help but compare this iteration of the squad to the 2008 championship-winning team that he was part of. The 44-year-old wasn't afraid to admit that this Jayson Tatum-led side is better than the '08 Celtics:

“People have asked me that the last three days, and I know people are gonna be mad at me — I think they’re better than us,” Scalabrine said on an appearance of SirusXM NBA Radio (h/t Souichi Terada of Mass Live). “I think they’re better than our ‘08 team.”

That's quite a hot take. That 2008 squad memorably took the title back to Boston behind the heroics of Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, and Ray Allen, to name a few — all of whom have already been inducted into the Hall of Fame. More importantly, that was the last Celtics side to win an NBA championship in the last 36 years.

Be that as it may, Scalibrine still believes that Tatum and this current Celtics team is capable of more.

“When you think about champions, to me, it’s what you do better than the next team,” Scalabrine said. “And I think what the Celtics do right now is the way they run five-out, the way they have decisions, the way they have shooting and everything like that is better than everybody else in the NBA. Then you add the defense to that.”

Jayson Tatum himself stated that this will all be for nothing unless they win the title. It's great that they're on top of the NBA right now, but unless they bring home the chip — something that they memorably failed to do last season — they still would have proved nothing.