It took about one week for the Boston Celtics championship parade to happen after winning the NBA Finals. In that time, the team traveled to Miami for a little R+R before returning back to Boston prior to the parade.
On Thursday, Al Horford made an appearance at Raising Cane’s, where he was an employee for a day and did a meet and greet with some of the fans.
Also on Thursday, Jayson Tatum stopped into Strega, an Italian restaurant in the North End, to interact with fans and bought the entire bar a round of shots.
On Friday, the city of Boston held over one million people to celebrate the Celtics winning a championship and to get the first glimpse at Banner 18.
The fans filled the streets, climbed on top of cars, emergency vehicles, and hung out of the windows of nearby apartment buildings just to celebrate with the Celtics becoming champions once again.
This team has been through it all together and they continue to come out on top as a resilient and more prepared team. For years, this group heard that “Tatum and Brown can’t win a title together” and they should be split up.
This group also picked up the pieces after the Kyrie Irving and Ime Udoka situations and still finished as one of the league’s best. There’s not much that this team hasn’t been through both on and off the court, including dealing with the crazed fans that make Celtics Nation the best fanbase in the NBA.
It’s acknowledged by everyone that playing in Boston isn’t easy. The historic franchise has championship standards and expectations that live within the city and it’s relayed back to the players, creating a pressure that they’ve never had to deal with before.
That said, everyone who does play in Boston at some point in their career, leaves with a much different perspective on the city after playing here.
With the core group of players finally winning a championship and getting to experience the love and support from the fans through the parade holds a certain level of weight when it comes to their futures with the team.
Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum are locked up for the foreseeable future, Jrue Holiday signed an extension already this past season through 2027-28, and Kristaps Porzingis did the same through 2025-26. Horford is signed for another year and will likely retire with the team someday.
The only member of the core group that’s left to re-sign is Derrick White and he deserves to get every penny coming his way. He’s eligible for a four-year, $125,888,000 extension, giving him an average annual value of $31.5 million.
Tatum and Brown getting to feel the love from one-two million of their fans at once, has to hit them in an overwhelming way and make them look at Boston differently.
I’m proud of this Celtics team. They did it!
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Photo Credit: Chris Marion, NBAE Getty Images
The Celtics Files 