The 2023-24 NBA season will draw to a close with the NBA Finals, played between the Boston Celtics and the Dallas Mavericks over a seven-game (if necessary) series scheduled to run from Friday 7 to Monday 24 June 2024.
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The driving narrative for this Finals series is whether the Celtics can break their drought and reclaim their title as the outright most successful franchise in NBA history: they are currently tied on 17 Championships with the Los Angeles Lakers.
Boston finished the Regular Season with the best record (64-18) before going on to defeat the Miami Heat, the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Indiana Pacers in the Playoffs to clinch the Eastern Conference title. This will be their second NBA Finals appearance in the last three seasons and a 23rd overall. However, they have not won the Championship since 2008 when they upstaged the Lakers over six games.
As for the Mavericks, they were only the fifth-seeded team in the Western Conference with a 50-32 record. They then defeated the Los Angeles Clippers, Oklahoma City Thunder and Minnesota Timberwolves for their first NBA Finals appearance since 2011 – when they won their first and only Championship by defeating the Miami Heat 4-2.
Another interesting element to this clash is the return of former Celtic player Kyrie Irving, who played in Boston from 2017 to 2019 but returns to the TD Garden for the first two games on Friday 7 and Monday 10 June as a key player in the Mavericks’ hunt for the Championship.
“He’s a great player. He’s done a lot of good things,” Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla said. “I think just how he’s carried himself, how he’s played this postseason has been one of the fun things to watch.
“He’s a great player and has done a lot of good things over the course of his career and he’s playing really well. You have to respect that and you can’t take that for granted. You have to be ready to guard him at a high level.”
Irving has formed a great partnership with fellow elite player Luka Doncic – and the Slovenian point guard could well prove the key man in the NBA Finals.
“But when you look at his [Doncic’s] game, I don’t know what you can nitpick about,” said Mavs coach Jason Kidd. “He can post up. He can pass. He has this fire that I think sometimes can be taken out of context. It’s just understanding that he wants to win. He’s not scared of nobody, and sometimes that can scare people.”
Kidd added, “The IQ is extremely high. He can take and make any shot. He can pass like no other. LeBron might be a little bit better defensively, and understand passing lanes (better). But when you talk about the stage — Ky (Irving), Luka, Dirk (Nowitzki) — the great ones aren’t scared. If you miss that shot, he’ll be like, ‘Look, my bad. You guys got me where we needed to go, and I needed to deliver.’ It’s pretty cool to watch.”
The 2024 NBA Finals also marks just the third time that two Black head coaches will face off in the championship series. The previous instance was in 1975 when Al Attles led the Golden State Warriors against K.C. Jones and the Washington Bullets, and in 2017, Mike Brown and the Warriors, filling in for Steve Kerr, faced Ty Lue and the Cleveland Cavaliers.
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NBA broadcast details
Friday 7 June
02:30: Game 1, Boston Celtics v Dallas Mavericks – LIVE on ESPN
Monday 10 June
02:00: Game 2, Boston Celtics v Dallas Mavericks – LIVE on ESPN
Thursday 13 June
02:30: Game 3, Dallas Mavericks v Boston Celtics – LIVE on ESPN
Saturday 15 June
02:30: Game 4, Dallas Mavericks v Boston Celtics – LIVE on ESPN
Tuesday 18 June
02:30: Game 5 (if necessary), Boston Celtics v Dallas Mavericks – LIVE on ESPN
Friday 21 June
02:30: Game 6 (if necessary), Dallas Mavericks v Boston Celtics – LIVE on ESPN
Monday 24 June
02:00: Game 7 (if necessary), Boston Celtics v Dallas Mavericks – LIVE on ESPN