Boston Celtics in the context of NHL

The Los Angeles Lakers are an American professional basketball team based in Los Angeles. The Lakers compete in the National Basketball Association (NBA) as a member of the Pacific Division of the Western Conference. The Lakers play their home games at Crypto.com Arena, an arena they share with the Los Angeles Sparks of the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) and the Los Angeles Kings of the National Hockey League (NHL). The Lakers are one of the most successful teams in the history of the NBA with 17 championships, the second most in the league behind the Boston Celtics.

The franchise began in 1946 as the Detroit Gems of the National Basketball League (NBL). After one season, a new ownership relocated the team to Minneapolis, Minnesota, and renamed the team as the Minneapolis Lakers. The Lakers won the 1948 NBL championship before joining the rival Basketball Association of America, where they won the 1949 BAA championship. Following the merger of the NBL and the BAA into the NBA in 1949, the Lakers won four of the next five NBA championships. After struggling financially in the late 1950s, they relocated to Los Angeles before the 1960–61 season.

Chauncey Ray Billups (born September 25, 1976) is an American professional basketball coach and former player who is the suspended head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers of the National Basketball Association (NBA). After playing college basketball with the Colorado Buffaloes, he was selected third overall in the 1997 NBA draft by the Boston Celtics. Billups spent the majority of his 17-year basketball career playing for the Detroit Pistons, where he won the NBA Finals MVP in 2004 after helping the Pistons beat the Los Angeles Lakers in the Finals. He was given the nickname "Mr. Big Shot" for making late-game shots with Detroit. A five-time NBA All-Star, a three-time All-NBA selection, and two-time NBA All-Defensive selection, Billups also played for the Toronto Raptors, Denver Nuggets, Minnesota Timberwolves, New York Knicks, and Los Angeles Clippers during his NBA career. He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2024.

Billups worked as a studio analyst after his retiring from playing in 2014. The Pistons retired his No. 1 jersey in 2016. He started coaching as an assistant for the Los Angeles Clippers during the 2020–21 season. Billups was appointed as head coach of the Trail Blazers in 2021.

The Atlanta Hawks are an American professional basketball team based in Atlanta. The Hawks compete in the National Basketball Association (NBA) as a member of the Southeast Division of the Eastern Conference. The team plays its home games at State Farm Arena.

The team's origins can be traced to the establishment of the Buffalo Bisons in 1946 in Buffalo, New York, a member of the National Basketball League (NBL) owned by Ben Kerner and Leo Ferris. After 38 days in Buffalo, the team moved to Moline, Illinois, where they were renamed the Tri-Cities Blackhawks. In 1949, they joined the NBA as part of the merger between the NBL and the Basketball Association of America (BAA), and briefly had Red Auerbach as coach. In 1951, Kerner moved the team to Milwaukee, where they changed their name to the Milwaukee Hawks. Kerner and the team moved again in 1955 to St. Louis, where they won their first (and thus far only) NBA Championship in 1958 and qualified to play in the NBA Finals in 1957, 1960 and 1961. The Hawks played the Boston Celtics in all four of their trips to the NBA Finals. The St. Louis Hawks moved to Atlanta on May 3, 1968, when Kerner sold the franchise to Thomas Cousins and former Georgia Governor Carl Sanders. The ownership of the team includes billionaire James Cox Chambers.

John Young Brown Jr. (December 28, 1933 – November 22, 2022) was an American politician and entrepreneur from Kentucky. He served as the 55th governor of Kentucky from 1979 to 1983, and built Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) into a multimillion-dollar restaurant chain.

The son of United States Representative John Y. Brown Sr., Brown's talent for business became evident in college, where he made a substantial amount of money selling Encyclopædia Britannica sets. After briefly practicing law with his father, he purchased Kentucky Fried Chicken from founder Harland Sanders in 1964. Brown turned the company into a worldwide success and sold his interest in the company for a huge profit in 1971. He then invested in several other restaurant ventures, but none matched the success of KFC. During the 1970s, he also owned, at various times, three professional basketball teams: the American Basketball Association's Kentucky Colonels, and the National Basketball Association's Boston Celtics and Buffalo Braves (currently the Los Angeles Clippers).

The Basketball Association of America (BAA) was a professional basketball league in North America, founded in 1946. Following its third season, 1948–49, the BAA merged with the National Basketball League (NBL) to form the National Basketball Association (NBA).

The Philadelphia Warriors won the inaugural BAA championship in 1947, followed by the Baltimore Bullets and the Minneapolis Lakers in 1948 and 1949, respectively. Six teams from the BAA remain in operation in the NBA as of the 2024–25 season, three that co-founded the league in 1946 (Boston Celtics, New York Knicks, and Philadelphia Warriors) and three that joined it from the NBL in 1948 (Fort Wayne Pistons, Minneapolis Lakers, and Rochester Royals). The inaugural BAA season began with 11 teams, of which four dropped out before the second season. One team joined from the American Basketball League (ABL) to provide 8 teams for 1947–48 and four NBL teams joined to provide 12 for 1948–49. The records and statistics of the BAA and NBL prior to the merger in 1949 are considered in official NBA history only if a player, coach or team participated in the newly formed NBA after 1949 for one or more seasons.

The 1960–61 NBA season was the 15th season of the National Basketball Association. The season ended with the Boston Celtics winning their 3rd straight NBA title, beating the St. Louis Hawks 4 games to 1 in the NBA Finals.