Were the #86Celtics the best passing team of all time?

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Last week I searched high and low on YouTube for the best and most awkward Larry Bird commercials. For this week’s edition of #86Celtics, I was back on the hunt, this time for actual basketball footage, all in the name of answering this question:

Are the #86Celtics the best passing team of all time?

For starters, the presence of Bill Walton sure helps the Celtics’ cause. Walton was and still is one of the best passing centers of all time. He was player who not only understood team basketball, but expressed that knowledge in a way that teammates latched on to. Remember the immediate impact Kevin Garnett had on the 2008 champs? Okay, so take that down a few notches. Now imagine KG spent his off time taking bong hits under a black light instead of screaming at a mirror inside a cold, dark room. That's what Bill Walton did for the #86Celtics. His team spirit was contagious.

Walton clicked especially well with Larry Bird. The pair consistently made other teams look silly with a two-man game that encapsulated so many cerebral aspects of passing — from the geometry to body control to misdirection to — honestly, just watch this clip:

And the more they played the more they evolved with different routines and variations to keep the opposition thinking. And once they caught you thinking, you’d already lost.

Now that’s beautiful but for pure aesthetics you need to see the #86Celtics run a fast break. I don’t want to be that guy who uses nostalgia to tear down “today’s NBA” but you don’t see fast breaks like this anymore. The ball never touches the ground. If Norman Dale had left Hickory to launch a second career as a porn director, this is the climax of his first feature film.

But the #86Celtics also dominated in the half-court, and that’s especially impressive considering the 3-pointer was basically non-existent. The defense didn’t have as much space to cover, and you figure that made it more difficult to create open shots.

The #86Celtics got along fine, though. That’s because they simultaneously had two of the most unstoppable offensive weapons in NBA history, and in the prime of their careers. The Celtics had two guys — especially Kevin McHale — who demanded double teams. That kept the defense frantic while the Celtics sat back like surgeons. In this next clip, you’ll first see Bird abuse a double team but then it’s all McHale. Watch how fast the defense freaks every time he touches the ball in the post, and how fast the Celtics move to take advantage.

This next one’s a little more Bird-oriented but it’s about the whole team and better described as “simply ridiculous.”

And speaking of ridiculous, here’s a little more of ’86 Larry Bird doing what ’86 Larry Bird was known to do:

So yeah, back to the original question.

Are the #86Celtics the best passing team of all time?

People like to say so, but there’s no way to really prove it. Where would you even start? What goes into definitively establishing the best passing team ever as the “Best. Passing Team. Ever.”?

It might be nice to just fall back on assists but it’s not that simple. If it is, then we can stop the conversation because the #86Celtics didn’t even lead the 1986 NBA in assists. The Lakers did. Not to mention the ’87 Celtics finished with more assists than the #86Celtics. So did the ’88 Celtics and the ’90 Celtics. And anyway just because a team passes a lot doesn’t mean they’re the best passers. There’s a difference between best and most prolific. We’re talking quality over quantity. And in that case the whole conversation is complicated by aesthetics. It’s so subjective. What makes one pass better than another?

The answer is personal preference, and that’s fine. That's passing. It might be a fundamental, but it's also an art form. While a bad pass is a bad pass is a bad pass, a great pass can mean many things and be appreciated on many levels, and arguing over words like “best” and “quality” is an insult to the art itself. It’s not there to make you angry or frustrated. It shouldn’t be a burden. Art is supposed to make you happy and if it does then who cares what anyone else thinks?

That said if you don’t find at least a lot of happiness in the way the #86Celtics shared the basketball, maybe basketball isn’t for you.

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