What happened the last time the Boston Celtics and Chicago Bulls faced each other in the NBA Playoffs
In the history of the NBA Playoffs, we’ve seen teams from the same division meet each other quite often. Some teams seem to meet each year and other teams see each other barely. In this “Last time they met” series, we’re going to look at the current NBA playoff matchups and review the last time these two teams met in the playoffs.
So…the Celtics and Bulls, huh? Currently, the Celtics are the 1st seed and the Bulls are 8th. The last time they faced each other was in 2009. This was the beginnings of the Big Three for Boston, although Kevin Garnett didn’t play in the series.
The Celtics won the NBA championship the year before and were the 2nd seed. Meanwhile, the Bulls were the 7th seed and had a young and upcoming team featuring Derrick Rose.
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This series was one of the best first round series you could ask for. It went to Game 7 and four of the games went into OT. There were seven overtime periods in the series, with one of them going to triple overtime.
This means on average, there was an overtime period for each game. I remember watching this series and just rooting for the NBA to make it a best out of 9. Like, seriously, it was a lot of good basketball here. The series started off with the Bulls shocking the Celtics in game one, and that was just the start.
It remains one of the longest series in terms of minutes played, in NBA history. Seven overtimes with five minutes each gives you 35 minutes. That’s almost another game (basically 3 quarters). Great series. That’s what you want in the Conference or NBA Finals.
Want more? At the end of Game 6, there were more overtime periods than actual games played. Sheesh.
So, this is really interesting but, the Celtics have only lost three games out of 17 against the Bulls in the playoffs. They faced Michael Jordan twice (86 and 87) and of course swept him. Now, of course, the Bulls were not the Bulls we know to dominate the NBA. But, that was interesting.
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Chicago may end up repeating history here. I don’t expect any more than five games out of this one. Boy, I’d love to see another 2009 matchup, though.