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NBA History: Jayson Tatum & Jaylen Brown record their 50th playoff game both scoring 20+ PTS, becoming the 8th duo to reach the mark. They join Larry Bird & Kevin McHale as the only Celtics duos to do so. The other duos: 74 - Jerry West & Elgin Baylor; 68 - Scottie Pippen & Michael Jordan; 67 - Shaquille O'Neal & Kobe Bryant; 58 - Kevin McHale & Larry Bird; 56 - Russell Westbrook & Kevin Durant; 53 - Klay Thompson & Stephen Curry; 50 - Tony Parker & Tim Duncan.
NBA: Congrats to @James Harden of the @cavs for moving up to 13th on the all-time PLAYOFFS SCORING list!
Congrats to @JHarden13 of the @cavs for moving up to 13th on the all-time PLAYOFFS SCORING list! pic.twitter.com/pQta1hCVJa
— NBA (@NBA) April 18, 2026
David Aldridge: Larry Bird, on the passing of Hall of Famer Oscar Schmidt Friday: "I always admired Oscar and considered him a friend, he was, without a doubt, one of the greatest players to ever play the game. "It was an honor of a lifetime when Oscar asked me to present him at his well deserved induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. My sincere condolences to Oscar's family."
NBA Stat: Players with the best winning percentage in the regular season is dominated by (minimum 164 games = two full seasons)… 𝟳𝟲.𝟮% — Cason Wallace ⏳ 𝟳𝟲.𝟬% — Chet Holmgren ⏳ 𝟳𝟰.𝟬% — Magic Johnson 𝟳𝟯.𝟵% — Rick Carlisle 𝟳𝟯.𝟲% — Larry Bird 𝟳𝟯.𝟱% — Festus Ezeli 𝟳𝟯.𝟭% — K.C. Jones
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You’ve said it in the book and repeatedly elsewhere that the ’86 team is the greatest of all time. Obviously, they had talent with you, Larry Bird and Kevin McHale and Bill Walton just joined the team. But why does that team have the edge over the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls or the Golden State Warriors during their championship runs? Robert Parish: “Bill Walton. The league did not have an answer for William. Nobody had an answer for William. I felt like that was the difference maker. The Bulls and the Warriors couldn’t do anything with Bill Walton coming off the bench. We had an MVP coming off the bench. [Bill] Wennington or Luc Longley would’ve had their hands full. William was a tough, tough cover. The Golden State Warriors do it collectively with their defensive strategy and don’t depend on individual defense. Still, I just don’t see how anybody can deal with that. I think Bill Walton was like Moses Malone. You couldn’t quite figure them out. There is something about the way he plays the game and the way he goes about his business with getting it done. Playing against a left-handed ball player kind of throws your rhythm off a little bit. Those two guys messed my rhythm up with that style of play. That’s the best way I can describe it.”
DeMarcus Cousins: Larry Bird is for sure a legend, but you know, the new talking heads in this new generation of basketball like to put guys like LeBron, KD, Kawhi ahead of Larry on the all-time list. Does that bother you at all when you hear things like that? Robert Parish: First of all, with all due respect to those guys, they're not in the same conversation with Larry. The best of the best, it's hard, hard to get a seat at that table. The only one that I think may be able to get a seat at that table other than obviously LeBron and Durant… but both are old-school! I'm talking about the new guys. Maybe the big fella up there in Denver, Nikola Jokic.
Robert Parish: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. To answer your question, his teammates didn’t challenge him. You can tell by how he looked at me, the deposition and stance that he took. There ain't nobody that challenged Michael. Michael had unchallenged power on that team. And rightly so. He was the main man. He should have had that. But, I just let him know that he's not the first superstar that I played with. Sh*t, Larry Bird was a superstar. I wasn't in awe of Michael Jordan. And I told him so. Sh*t, I played with a bad motherf*cker. Shit, Larry's one of the all-time greats. So why am I going to be in awe of Michael Jordan, may I ask? Let me give you a little context, how all that came about. The challenge, we scrimmage every day, when I was with the Bulls, same as when I was with the Celtics. So first, I was playing with the first team with Michael, Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman. And then Phil Jackson put me with the second unit and put Luc Longley back on the first unit. So we beat them four straight games. And so after the scrimmage was over, I asked Michael how did he like that ass whooping. So he took offense to that. [Laughing]
Did that change the dynamic with how the rest of the team talk to him? Robert Parish: Oh, hell no! They didn't have the nuts to do that. I was the only one who had the nuts to talk back to him to challenge him. Like I said earlier, I played with one of the all-time greats. Larry Bird is one of the best of the best. He set the deck table so I was not in awe of Michael Jordan. Hell no. I rolled with a player like that and not to mention we were successful too. I was a three-time champion when I joined the Bulls.
Andrew Gaze: This is in the early 90s when the Celtics are flying and stuff. And Dave Gavitt reached out to my dad and said, "Listen, we'd love to have Andrew at the Celtics sort of thing." And at the time, my dad was mentioning to me, you know, they're keen and I'm like, listen, they're fooling themselves. This is the Celtics. This is Larry Bird. I mean, I don't belong. They stayed with it and said, listen, just if you come to training camp, there was not a guarantee, but it was like, you come to camp with your skill sets… And I thought, no, I'm wasting my time. And all this already been through it with Seattle and I sometimes I think of well, what could have happened? What might have happened?
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NBA Courtside: Cooper Flagg on getting to meet his favorite player Larry Bird: “I was definitely nervous. I would say I haven’t been shell shocked a lot in my life. I was talking to him like about the difference in the league now between the league back then. But a lot of the messages that, you know, he displayed can be seen through his play, like never giving up, being that ultimate competitor, playing hard on every single possession. And those were kind of the biggest things that he said. As long as you have those couple things of competing and playing hard that you’ll be all right.” (Via @ESPNNBA)
Cooper Flagg on getting to meet his favorite player Larry Bird:
— NBA Courtside (@NBA__Courtside) March 16, 2026
“I was definitely nervous. I would say I haven’t been shell shocked a lot in my life. I was talking to him like about the difference in the league now between the league back then. But a lot of the messages that,… pic.twitter.com/0pHwXzUxXs
A 1992 Olympics Team USA jersey worn and signed by Larry Bird sold for $896,000 to lead all sales from the Scottie Pippen collection auction held by Sotheby’s. A total of 71 items from Pippen’s personal collection of memorabilia from his Hall of Fame career were sold in the auction, 11 of which went for $100,000 or more. In total, the auction brought in $6.2 million and included participants from 32 different countries, according to Sotheby’s. “Each jersey, sneaker, and collectible I’ve kept over the years holds a memory, a feeling, a story of perseverance and teamwork,” Pippen said in a Sotheby’s news release leading up to the auction. “Now, it feels like the right time to share these pieces and let others carry their stories forward. I’m excited to give fans and collectors the chance to own these special items, to connect with the history and memories they represent, and to experience a part of the journey I was lucky enough to live. I hope they bring the same kind of pride, joy, and love of the game that they’ve given me throughout my career.”
Robert Parish: Let’s talk Michael Jordan. People often ask me to compare and contrast Michael and Larry [Bird]. When I think about those two guys, the similarity I see between them is their competitiveness. Their drive and focus. They both had a strong distaste for losing. The biggest difference between them was their leadership style. Michael is a more aggressive person, more verbal and in your face. That’s how he leads. Larry led by example. He wasn’t a rah-rah guy or a yeller. He didn’t lead with words. He led with action. When you do that, you can stay a leader longer. People don’t get tired of your voice. You don’t become background noise or get tuned out. But finding differences between Michael and Larry is like nitpicking. In general, it was a pleasure to play with both.
What surprised you the most when you looked back at how the press covered Larry Bird during those years? Keith O’Brien: That's a good question. I think the most surprising thing about the media coverage was what Larry was able to do and say, or not do, and say and get away with in the late 1970s. I mean, to be completely frank about it: A black star could not have done and said the things that Larry Bird did and said at that time and received the kind of complimentary media coverage that Bird did receive in the late 1970s. I talked to dozens and dozens of college athletes who played with and against Bird in the 1970s. Many of them were black players, and some of them told me directly that it simply would not have happened that way for them. I think that gets it something crucial to the narrative. At the time, in the late 1970s, Bird was, of course, a real talent with the statistics to prove that he belonged, but the fact that he was a white star did matter. People spoke about it out loud at the time. General managers in the NBA, scouts, television executives, players, they knew and said out loud, that the fact that Larry Bird was a white star was significant to his theme and significant to the stakes and the stakeholders of the NBA as well.