Constructing a Winner - The 1985 - '86 celtics

and i understand the modesty but many attribute the success of that team or the building of that team to your leadership during that period and many of us think of it as the finest NBA team okay i wont argue ok what's it take to build a team like that and to have such great success and then to sit even what twenty five years later for people to say wow that was an absolutely marvelous job constructing that team well if you look at that team that the core team in eighty six was the core of uh... the one in eighty four and to a large degree was the team that won in eighty one so it wasn't a start from scratch operation what we had done was took the team that lost in the finals in eighty-five we'd won in eighty four lost in six games in eighty five and tweaked it a little bit with a couple of really good players and uh...who did you add we added bill walton we added jerry sichting to it to a team that was darn good anyway and uh... so we were we just we just added two really good players to a team that was outstanding to start with we were we were in a good position one we traded for actually we traded for both of them uh... they one was a uh... a free agent that we ended up making a deal for the other was a trade bill walton was a trade jerry sichting was a free agent now when you're building a team like that uh... with so many diverse personalities it must be tough to get them to gel properly to work as a team to work as uh... uh... an entity that can be successful well it wasn't very hard for that team uh... i know the more recent uh... example would be what the celtics did in '07/'08 uh... where uh... two uh... exceptional players joined an already exceptional player in paul pierce and ray allen arrived that was probably a more difficult uh... transition than what we we had because we had the core players we had bird and parish and McHale and dennis johnson and and danny ainge all there all playing same starting five um... the first three off the bench two of them were new and and the one that i suppose was the only one that we might have had some concern about was bill walton because he had always been a starter uh... he had had great success although not been on the floor enough he had been injured uh... two a large degree i think the most he had played was sixty five games in a season prior to coming to us and that year he played eighty could've played eighty two he had an injury that we kept him out for if it were a playoff game we probably would have played him uh... so he it's like damn yankees he may have sold his soul to the devil got a good year out of him uh... but he came really wanting to win a championship he was very highly motivated and if he ever stepped out of line and occasionally he did because he can be a pain in the butt and I've told him that to his face larry was there to put him right back in line and did that on a number of occassions larry was a very strong influence on everybody that played on that team Is that your favorite team 0:03:16.309,0:03:18.479 from the time you were with them that's the championship ring you're wearing it is the championship ring that i wear and i i i it's like having children you love them all for different reasons and nothing will for me replace winning my well it's not mine but our first championship while i was involved in the seventh game in nineteen seventy four that has particular appeal and I think seventy-six has appeal with the triple overtime game against pheonix so so there there are lots of reasons eighty one was extraordinary we came back from down three to one with philadelphia uh... so that was another one that that was extraordinary eighty four was a seven game series after we had fallen behind to the lakers and really looked to the rest of the world as though we were we were done uh... so there's a reason to love them all into hemisphere passlow please