# Lakers vs Celtics: 12 Finals, 35 Titles
> Boston has eighteen championships, Los Angeles seventeen. Fifteen rankings put that one-banner gap somewhere different every time.
*By YPB Team · Published September 19, 2026 · https://youpick.best/articles/lakers-vs-celtics-ranked*
---
Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics — the two sets of rafters that started the argument. Photos: Troutfarm27 (CC BY-SA 4.0) and Paul Keleher (CC BY 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons.
The Lakers and the Celtics have met twelve times in the NBA Finals, more than any other pair of teams in the league's history. Boston has eighteen championships and Los Angeles has seventeen, and until Boston's 2024 title they were level.
Money has just restated the same standoff in new numbers. The NBA approved the sale of the Celtics at a $6.1 billion valuation on 13 August 2025, a record for a US sports franchise at the time; almost exactly a year later, on 12 August 2026, the Lakers were sold to Joshua Kushner and Bob Iger for $12.5 billion.34
> Boston and Los Angeles are separated by exactly one championship, and fifteen lists find fifteen different ways to widen that banner or erase it.
## Greatest NBA franchise: one banner between them
The bluntest version of the question puts all thirty franchises in one list and asks which one has the best case. Los Angeles and Boston are the only two with a serious one.
Boston's case is the raw count. Eighteen titles is the league record, and the Celtics got there by winning the 2024 Finals, which broke a tie the two had shared since the Lakers won in 2020.2
Los Angeles answers with reach rather than arithmetic. Seventeen championships spread across Minneapolis, the Showtime era and the Kobe–Shaq three-peat means the franchise has been dominant in four separate decades, which Boston cannot quite claim.
Chicago, Golden State and San Antonio keep this from being a two-horse list. Each has a compressed, spectacular run behind it, and San Antonio's five titles all arrived inside twenty years.
The whole argument, compressed into one list of thirty. Play it →
## Russell's Celtics vs Showtime: whose dynasty was bigger
Narrow the question to dynasties rather than whole franchises and both teams get two entries, which nobody else manages.
Bill Russell's Celtics are the outlier of American team sport. Boston won eleven championships in thirteen seasons, including eight consecutive titles from 1959 to 1966 — a streak nobody in a major league has come close to since.5
Magic Johnson's Lakers took a different route. Los Angeles reached the Finals eight times during the 1980s and won five of them, and did it playing the fastest, most watched basketball of the era, on national television, in a city that turned courtside into a social event.
The Lakers get a second entry for 2000 to 2002, when Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant won three straight under Phil Jackson. Boston gets one for 1984 to 1986, the Bird, McHale and Parish front line that took two titles in three years.
Boston's headline total gets discounted for the era, fairly: Russell's league had eight or nine teams for most of his career, and a title took two playoff series rather than four. What the discount leaves out is that the Celtics still had to get past Wilt Chamberlain seven times to collect those banners, and that Chamberlain is one of two or three best players the sport has produced.
Two entries each, which is two more than any other franchise gets. Play it →
## The best NBA team of the 1980s is a Lakers or Celtics team
This list runs to fifteen options and nine of them are Los Angeles or Boston in a different year. The decade belonged to these two so completely that the Pistons and the 76ers turn up as interruptions.
The 1985–86 Celtics are the usual answer. Boston finished 67–15 and went 40–1 at home, a home record matched only once since, by the 2016 Spurs.6
Los Angeles has the better decade and a weaker single season. The Lakers won five championships in the 1980s to Boston's three, but no individual Lakers year quite matches 40–1.
Detroit is the third name worth naming here. The Bad Boys won the last two titles of the decade and did it by making the game slower and meaner than either of these teams wanted it.
Nine of the fifteen options are one of these two teams in a different year. Play it →
## 1971–72 Lakers vs 1995–96 Bulls: the single-season list
Widen the frame to every season ever played and the question stops being a two-team affair.
The 1971–72 Lakers are Los Angeles's entry and they hold a record nobody has touched: 69 wins, and a 33-game winning streak that is still the longest in major American professional sport.7
Boston's entry is the 1985–86 Celtics again, whose 67 wins meet much stiffer company here than they did a section ago.
Chicago is what makes this section different from the last three. The 1995–96 Bulls went 72–10, which broke the Lakers' 24-year win record, and the Warriors then broke that in 2016. On this particular question the rivalry is a subplot.
Here they stop arguing with each other and start arguing with Chicago. Play it →
## Magic, Kareem and Kobe against Russell, Bird and Cousy
Ask which franchise could field the best all-time starting five and the two rosters barely overlap in shape.
Los Angeles can put Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Shaquille O'Neal, Kobe Bryant and LeBron James on the floor together. Four of those five have a Finals MVP and three of them are plausible top-ten players in the sport's history.
Boston counters with Bob Cousy, John Havlicek, Larry Bird, Kevin McHale and Bill Russell. The Celtics have had 41 Hall of Famers wear the jersey at some point, which is what a century of depth looks like.5
The honest objection is that Boston's five are weighted towards one era while Los Angeles's spread across five decades. The reply is that a team of Russell, Bird and McHale would out-defend and out-rebound almost anyone.
Five names each, and barely a position where the two lists agree. Play it →
## Kareem to the Lakers, Garnett to the Celtics: the trade list
Fifteen trades changed the league permanently, and Los Angeles is responsible for a third of them.
The Lakers appear five times: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar from Milwaukee in 1975, Wilt Chamberlain in 1968, Pau Gasol in 2008, Anthony Davis in 2019, and the Gary Payton and Karl Malone additions of 2003. Four of those five produced a Finals appearance within two years.
Boston appears once. Kevin Garnett arrived from Minnesota in 2007 for a package of players and picks, and Boston won the championship the following June — its first since 1986.
That one-to-five split is the cleanest statistical difference between the two franchises in these fifteen lists. It says less about talent than about temperament: Los Angeles rebuilds by acquisition, Boston by accumulation.
Los Angeles takes five of the fifteen slots. Boston takes one. Play it →
## Phil Jackson vs Red Auerbach: the coaching list
Seventeen coaches make this list and the top two are a Lakers man and a Celtics man, which is not a coincidence.
Phil Jackson's eleven titles from the bench are the most any coach has won in the NBA, five of them in Los Angeles and six in Chicago.8
Red Auerbach won nine as Boston's head coach, including the eight straight from 1959 to 1966, then spent another eighteen years as the Celtics' general manager building the teams Bird would inherit.9
Pat Riley belongs to Los Angeles too, and Gregg Popovich has five rings with one franchise. The rivalry supplies the top two names on this list and then has to share the rest.
The rivalry argued through the men in the suits. Play it →
## Lakers vs Celtics against Yankees vs Red Sox
Los Angeles and Boston arrive here as a single option, because the rivalry itself is what gets ranked.
The case for it is the twelve Finals meetings, which no other pairing in the NBA gets near, and the fact that the two biggest trophy cabinets in the league belong to the two teams in it.1
Yankees versus Red Sox is the American rejoinder, and a strong one: a century of it, in the same division, with the 2004 comeback as its defining episode.
Then there is everything outside the United States — Real Madrid against Barcelona, Brazil against Argentina, Senna against Prost — where the rivalries carry national weight that a league rivalry never quite reaches.
The only list where the two of them arrive as a single option. Play it →
## The Yankees problem: basketball against baseball and football
Widen it to every American sport and both franchises stop being the biggest thing in the room.
The New York Yankees have 27 World Series championships, a Major League Baseball record, and they have been the default answer to this question for about eighty years.10
Boston's eighteen and Los Angeles's seventeen are the best basketball can offer, and basketball is the youngest of the three sports. The NBA did not exist until 1946, by which point the Yankees had already won fourteen.
The Cowboys, the Packers and the Patriots make the football case, and the Montreal Canadiens quietly hold 24 Stanley Cups. It is a genuinely open list, which none of the previous seven have been.
Basketball's biggest names, measured against football and baseball. Play it →
## Which fanbase is more loyal: Los Angeles or Boston
Loyalty is the lens where trophies stop helping and the two cities behave in genuinely different ways.
Los Angeles travels. The Lakers draw the biggest visiting support in the league, and a road game in a neutral city frequently sounds like a home one.
Boston stays. The Celtics' support is local, inherited and famously unsentimental about the team's own players, and it fills the building whether the season is going well or not.
Neither is the obvious answer on a list of eighteen, because the honest winner of a loyalty question is usually a franchise with an empty trophy case. That is why Sacramento, Portland and Utah are all on here.
One fanbase travels. The other one never leaves. Play it →
## TD Garden vs Crypto.com Arena: the buildings
Judge the rooms instead of the teams and the two franchises swap their usual positions.
TD Garden opened in 1995 as the replacement for the original Boston Garden, and it carries the banners, the retired numbers and a parquet floor that the Celtics have used since the 1940s.11
Crypto.com Arena opened on 17 October 1999 as Staples Center, and its reputation is built on the celebrity rows rather than the noise.12
Madison Square Garden complicates it, and so do the newer, louder buildings in Golden State and Oklahoma City.
A parquet floor against a building named after a crypto exchange. Play it →
## Lakers gold against Celtics green: the jersey list
Eighteen jerseys compete here, and the two best known are the two that never changed.
The Lakers' gold home jersey is the one Magic Johnson wore and the one Kobe Bryant wore, essentially unaltered across forty years, so it now reads as a colour rather than a kit.
Boston's green road jersey has carried the same shamrock script since Bill Russell's era, and the number 6 on it is retired league-wide, not just in Boston.
Then there are the jerseys nobody kept: Toronto's purple dinosaur, Vancouver's teal, Miami's Vice City run.
Gold against green, with no third colour in the conversation. Play it →
## Lucky the Leprechaun vs the Seattle SuperSonics mark
Logos break the pattern. Neither franchise has changed anything in seventy years, and novelty counts for a lot in this category.
Boston has Lucky the Leprechaun — a cartoon spinning a ball on one finger, unchanged in spirit since 1950 and instantly readable at any size.
Los Angeles has a wordmark and a basketball, which is about as plain as a famous logo gets, and its defenders say the plainness is exactly the point.
Seattle is the reason this section exists. The SuperSonics' green-and-gold basketball-and-Space-Needle mark retired with the franchise when it moved to Oklahoma City after the 2007–08 season, and a logo people can no longer buy tends to do well on lists like this.13
A shamrock and a leprechaun against a franchise that no longer exists. Play it →
## The most overrated NBA franchise: the list they don't want
Every previous section rewarded the Lakers and the Celtics for being famous. This one charges them for it.
Los Angeles is the standing accusation. Seventeen championships and a permanent seat in the national conversation means every Lakers season is covered as though it matters, including the ones that do not.
Boston's version of the charge is about the arithmetic rather than the attention: most of the eighteen banners came from a league of eight or nine teams, and the Celtics have won three titles in the last forty years.
New York is the wildcard. The Knicks are, with the Celtics, one of only two original NBA franchises still in their founding city, and they have spent most of the time since being discussed far more than they have been winning.
Seventeen other franchises sit alongside them, and the sharpest cases belong to the recent ones: Brooklyn assembled two superteams and never reached a conference final, while Philadelphia's rebuild was covered as a revolution and produced exactly one. Either is an easier charge to prove than anything against Boston or Los Angeles. That is what a list like this is for.
The one list where being talked about constantly counts against you. Play it →
## Best basketball city in America: Boston, Los Angeles, or neither
The last question drops the franchises entirely and asks about the places.
Boston has the most NBA championships of any American city and a college scene built around the Beanpot schools, which is a narrower claim than it sounds, because the city's basketball identity is almost entirely one team.
Los Angeles has the Lakers' seventeen and something Boston cannot match: UCLA, whose men's programme won ten national titles in twelve years under John Wooden, most of them in the same decades the Lakers were winning.
New York is the standard answer anyway. Rucker Park has run its Harlem summer tournament since 1956, and the playground game there shaped how the sport is played everywhere else.
The list also carries Indianapolis, Lexington, Chapel Hill, Lawrence and Storrs — towns where the college programme is the civic identity, and where the case for a basketball city has nothing to do with the NBA at all.
The two of them, and every college town that thinks it belongs here. Play it →
## One banner, fifteen different sizes
Across fifteen lists the gap between Boston and Los Angeles never stays the same width. On the dynasty questions it is enormous and on the trade questions it runs the other way; on the logo and the city questions it disappears entirely behind names neither franchise controls. The single banner separating them turns out to be the least informative number in the whole argument.
None of these fifteen lists was scored option by option. Each came out of [head-to-head voting](/articles/what-is-pairwise-comparison) between two entries, repeated until the order held.
And if the question you care about is missing (best Celtics team of the 2000s, worst Lakers signing, greatest parade), nobody has built it yet. Build it.
## More rankings, more angles
- [Magic Johnson vs Larry Bird: 47 Years of the Same Argument](/articles/magic-johnson-vs-larry-bird-ranked) — the same rivalry, fought by two players
- [Wilt Chamberlain vs Bill Russell: 100 Points, 11 Rings](/articles/wilt-chamberlain-vs-bill-russell-ranked) — the 1960s version, centre against centre
- [Chicago Bulls: 72 Wins in 1996, 31 in 2026](/articles/chicago-bulls-ranked-many-ways) — the franchise that interrupted both of them
Sources
Wikipedia, Celtics–Lakers rivalry, 12 NBA Finals meetings and the results by decade: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-09-19)
Wikipedia, List of NBA champions, championship totals and the 2020–2024 tie: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-09-19)
ESPN, NBA board of governors approves the Celtics sale at a $6.1 billion valuation, 13 August 2025: espn.com (checked 2026-09-19)
NBC Los Angeles, Lakers sold to Joshua Kushner and Bob Iger for $12.5 billion, 12 August 2026: nbclosangeles.com (checked 2026-09-19)
Wikipedia, Boston Celtics: 11 titles in 13 seasons under Bill Russell, eight consecutive 1959–1966, and 41 Hall of Famers: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-09-19)
Wikipedia, 1985–86 Boston Celtics season, 67–15 overall and 40–1 at home: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-09-19)
Wikipedia, 1971–72 Los Angeles Lakers season, 69–13 and the 33-game winning streak: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-09-19)
Wikipedia, Phil Jackson, eleven championships as a head coach: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-09-19)
Wikipedia, Red Auerbach, eight consecutive titles as head coach and eighteen years as Celtics general manager: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-09-19)
Wikipedia, New York Yankees, 27 World Series championships: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-09-19)
Wikipedia, TD Garden, opened 1995 as the replacement for the original Boston Garden: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-09-19)
Wikipedia, Crypto.com Arena, opened 17 October 1999 as Staples Center: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-09-19)
Wikipedia, Seattle SuperSonics, relocated to Oklahoma City after the 2007–08 season: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-09-19)
