BOSTON — “Right away,” said Jaylen Brown. “The very first one.”
That’s when Jaylen Brown knew how special the Boston Celtics-Los Angeles Lakers rivalry is.
It was February 3, 2017. Brown got the start alongside Isaiah Thomas, Jae Crowder, Amir Johnson, and Al Horford. LA rolled out D’Angelo Russell, Nick Young, Tarik Black, Luol Deng, and Timofey Mozgov.
That year’s Lakers squad went just 26-56. They finished 14th in the West while the Celtics went on to make an Eastern Conference finals run. But that differentiating factor didn’t matter.
“Every experience [of] Celtics-Lakers is like, you could feel the atmosphere, you could feel the energy in the building,” Brown said. “And then, as a player, like, what better environment for basketball do you want? A lot of history. A lot of people tuned in. A lot of people excited. So, all you got to do is show up ready to play.”
It didn’t matter then, and it didn’t matter on Friday night.
Celtics-Lakers will always mean something
The Lakers walked into TD Garden without two of their top three guys. Luka Doncic didn’t travel with the team because he was in Slovenia for the birth of his child, and LeBron James was out due to sciatica.
That didn’t bother Boston.
“Just another game,” said Brown. “Obviously, those are great players, so it's an honor to compete against those guys, but my job is to go out there help my team get wins, and that's what we did tonight.”
“Maybe for the fans, but we're trying to win a game,” Pritchard said when asked if Doncic and James’ absence took some juice out of the matchup. “I mean, it puts another W in the wind column for us if we win it. So, it doesn't matter who's playing out there.”
Austin Reaves was left as the driving force of LA’s offense, but he might as well have been a bug in the path of a semi-truck’s windshield on Friday. Boston came out of the gates red-hot, seemingly a carry-over from their win over the Washington Wizards on Thursday.
Three after three, the Celtics quickly mounted a 29-point lead by the second quarter, finishing the evening with a wire-to-wire victory over their long-time rivals.
Yet the presence of stakes and star talent is merely a barometer of how energized the experience is, not whether it will be.
When Doncic came to Boston last season as a Laker for the first time, it was the loudest TD Garden had been since the 2024 NBA Championship (and it may have rivaled that crowd). But whenever green meets cold, there’s a little extra something in the air.
“It's definitely more fun when the crowd gets more into it,” said Pritchard. “And I feel like they do so for sure, kind of adds a sense of joy.”
Everyone understands the stakes. The history. The legacy.
“The atmosphere is always amazing,” said Brown. “A lot of history that started well before I was born. But the 10 years that I've been here, I've enjoyed being able to participate. It’s been fun.”
That’s the difference. The nitty-gritty of the rivalry isn’t for everyone. Living on a game-to-game basis can make it hard to really live in the moment and let emotions take the lead for a rivalry game, especially in the regular season.
But that doesn’t mean the appreciation isn’t there.
“ I think you have to be aware. It's a blessing to be able to be a part of something that is much bigger than yourself,” said Joe Mazzulla.
“I mean, this rivalry has been around a lot longer. It's going to be around longer than I'm here. And so, I think it's just, along the way, you take advantage of the perspective and the blessing of it.”
For the native Rhode Islander, the 2008 title run was what cemented his respect for the rivalry.
“I would probably say in '08 was probably the biggest version of that,” he said. “I think I was in college, and I really started to appreciate basketball. So, I would say that kind of brought to light that from that competitive standpoint.”
Even with Doncic and James out, TD Garden was loud on Friday night. And not just because of the blowout win.
When the purple and gold are in town, the entire mood of the arena shifts. And should the two sides meet in the playoffs in the near future, that shift would apply to the whole city.
It’s history personified.
“I understand the opportunity and blessing that it is to be able to do that,” Mazzulla said. “You can't take that for granted.”