Inside the unbridled joy of covering the NBA Finals

When I was 10 years old, I decided I wanted to be a Celtics writer.

I didn’t know much about what that entailed, but I knew that one thing: nothing in the world made me happier than being at TD Garden – something about the energy in the arena, the authentic human interaction, the unbridled joy that could inundate a crowd as a result of something as simple as a ball going through a hoop.

So, I started a Celtics website — creatively named Boston Celtics Info — and every morning, I published my takes: Von Wafer was going to be the next big thing, I was sure of it. And Rajon Rondo was the greatest point guard who had ever walked the planet.

And the 39-27 Celtics had enough to win a championship in 2011, I was certain. I didn’t know exactly how, but Avery Bradley had the makings of a champion.

At 13, I saw that Bleacher Report was hiring a full-time NBA writer, and I applied, adding a note I was confident would do the trick: “I don’t have the minimum five years of experience, but I really love basketball.” For two weeks, I woke up every morning and ran to my mom’s computer, still half asleep, logging into my email in hopes of some good news.

It never came, but a different email did:

The rejection email felt like a punch to the chest – somehow, I felt qualified for this senior writing position despite not having started high school. Nobody watched more Celtics games than me. Nobody knew the stats better. Most importantly, nobody loved TD Garden more.

Didn’t Bleacher Report know that?

In hindsight, it seems like the appropriate decision – I didn’t know much about defensive schemes or offensive spacing or much of anything at all.

And I still had to finish the 8th grade.

So, I folded up the dream of covering the Celtics and put it away in a box and buried it so deep that by the time I got to high school, being a sports journalist wasn’t even a stated goal of mine. The domain of bostoncelticsinfo.weebly.com lived on, but the concept of writing or talking about a professional basketball team felt like a pipe dream.

However, my love for basketball never wavered, through years of playing in high school and club and college, through writing for my town and school paper, through following and watching and talking about the Celtics like my livelihood depended on it.

But fourteen years after the devastating Bleacher Report rejection, I got an email that changed the course of my life in a way I couldn’t imagine – an acceptance letter from here at CelticsBlog, where I’d be able to live out my lifelong dream of covering the Celtics – albeit a bit delayed. I had applied on a whim after a series of coincidences and circumstances that would be hard to explain, and written my draft article in a long car ride home from a hike in the New Hampshire mountains.

I knew right away it was the greatest email I had ever received in my life.

It took fifteen years — but covering the NBA Finals for SB Nation was a full-circle moment that even the most aspirational kid in me couldn’t have visualized. For nearly two weeks, I was deeply submerged in basketball nirvana: a convening of the most brilliant basketball players, thinkers, and writers, first gathering in Boston for the launch of the Finals, then in Dallas with the chance to close it out, and finally back in my favorite place in the world for one magical night that culminated in the Celtics getting crowned as world champions.

We watched a team that fully embraced team basketball put individual accolades to the side in pursuit of an elusive 18th banner. That phenomenon was accentuated when Jaylen Brown received his Finals MVP trophy and immediately opted to shout out Jayson Tatum in a moment that could have been about himself.

“I share this with my brothers, and my partner-in-crime, Jayson Tatum,” were Brown’s first words after being named MVP. “He was with me the whole way.”

All year long, they told us it was about the team. The concept came up in nearly every press conference; when Tatum got a question about himself as an individual, he typically began his answer with “we;” you asked Joe Mazzulla about Payton Pritchard, he’d start praising every player on the bench.

But they always say to show not tell, and these Boston Celtics showed us it was team-first from the start, whether in the form of Jrue Holiday coming off of an All Star year and accepting the fact some nights he might get just five shots, or through the unwavering energy on the bench from Oshae Brissett, even if he hadn’t seen the court in weeks.

Holiday nailed it when he was asked how he wants the 2024 Celtics team to be remembered fifty years from now: “I hope that when people watch us play, they see the joy that we play with, that we love playing together, and we got it done together.”

The experience of going from fan to reporter is a fascinating one; you inevitably lose some of the bias, but at the same time, you gain a level of respect and appreciation for everyone involved in the journey to a championship. In my experience, that unleashed emotion is far more powerful than any admiration I had previously felt.

The appreciation extends to the trainers who are out on the court stretching Al Horford pregame, the medical staff who did everything in their power to clear Kristaps Porzingis so he could contribute to the clinching game, the developmental coaches who you don’t even see on the bench, but who do all the little things behind-the-scenes, whether that’s spearheading pregame drills hours before tip-off or troubleshooting tech issues. Hours before each game, for example, developmental coach Jermaine Bucknor often troubleshoots with the arena’s tech people to make sure all the laptops are hooked up to power by the bench and that the team can watch pregame film, an unglamorous task that typically requires a couple of phone calls

Perhaps the coolest part of covering a championship run is that all of the mundane scenes you were a fly-on-the-wall for all season long serve as building blocks for the championship moments. There’s an undeniable joy associated with watching a group of people you’re around for months celebrate the fruits of their labor with so much emotion.

Take Xavier Tillman, for example. Traded to Boston midseason, Tillman became someone I spent a lot of time observing and chatting with as he acclimated to the organization. TD Garden generally opens access to the media three hours before tipoff, and a handful of reporters routinely came to the Garden the moment that doors would open. We were captivated by the prospect of learning as much as we could about the rigorous process of staying ready on a championship-caliber roster.

My pregame routine typically began by observing Jordan Walsh and JD Davison as they got their individual work in with the developmental team, and spanned all the way through pregame pressers with coaches and Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown getting shots up in front of thousands of Celtics fans who clamored for autographs.

After Tillman joined the Celtics, I watched him make a concerted effort to practice corner three-pointers, methodically firing off threes and sinking them at a substantially-improving clip, typically aided by assistant coaches DJ MacLeay and Jermaine Bucknor.

“Those are my guys,” Tillman told me the day before the Celtics won the championship, gushing about how much confidence they’ve given him since he arrived in Boston.

So, when he hit a big one in Game 3, I’ll be the first to admit I did feel joy. There’s a unique joy in watching people succeed at something you’ve watched them work at behind the scenes, while never knowing if they’d get the chance to show it — all while doing it in the name of something greater than themselves.

Getting to ask Tillman about that shot moments after the win — and in particular, about his raucous celebration with the Stay Ready group — was a fitting way to punctuate months of observing him refining his craft.

On the night that the Celtics secured the championship, I sat in the Garden and attempted to write. But how do you capture the emotions of watching a group of people overcome doubt, criticism, humiliation, and loss en route to achieving the ultimate basketball glory?

By 6 a.m., I’d seen nearly half the team return from postgame celebrations and take one last peek at the confetti-covered parquet. Jaylen Brown returned at 5 a.m. with an unshakeable grin plastered across his face, Finals MVP trophy in hand, observing an eclectic collection of media and Celtics staff engage in a makeshift pickup game at TD Garden.

“What a beautiful sight,” he repeatedly said.

When I left TD Garden at 6 a.m., I’d only written about 30 words, staring at my computer and trying to figure out where to start. But I’ll be writing about this team and this journey until my laptop crumples to dust — about the way Joe Mazzulla prioritized personal connection and treated each and every person on the roster with intent, about how a superstar like Jayson Tatum was able to put aside his ego en route to a championship, about the unbridled joy on Jaylen Brown’s face when he returned to the Garden just before sunrise, just to get up one more shot on a parquet floor littered with piles of green and white confetti his efforts brought forth from the rafters.

In the meantime, I am just grateful — grateful for the opportunity to have watched the journey it takes to get to the top of the mountain, to have spoken with and written about the people it took to get there, and for the chance to live out a dream that even the most aspirational 8th grader couldn’t have fathomed was possible.