NBA: Ranking the top 10 moments of the decade

5. Los Angeles Lakers beat the Boston Celtics in Game 7 of the 2010 NBA Finals

Ah yes, what better way to kick off the first championship moment than with the most epic rivalry in sports history, the Lakers and the Celtics (12 finals meetings and 33 championships between the franchises).

This rivalry extends all the way back to 1959 when these two teams met for the first time going on to meet six times in the 1960s with Bill Russell (11 time champion) and the Lakers featuring Jerry West (the NBA logo silhouette), three times in the 1980s where the NBA gained mass global appeal featuring Larry Bird’s Celtics against Magic Johnson’s Lakers and was finally reignited once more in 2008.

After Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen went to the Celtics to form the OG Big Three with Paul Pierce the Celtics had the biggest single-season turnaround of all-time winning only 24 games as the second-worst team in the league in 2006-07 and winning 66 games for the best record in the league in 2007-08.

Meanwhile, during that season Kobe Bryant was having an MVP campaign with little help around him finally acquiring a second star when the Lakers traded for superstar big man Pau Gasol in February of ‘08. Kobe had a lot to prove as he had not returned to the finals since Shaquille O’Neal was traded from the Lakers to the Heat in 2004 and all these players had grown up watching Magic and Bird go at it so they knew how serious the Lakers-Celtics rivalry was.

In 2008, the Lakers and Celtics trades paid off as they both reached the Finals, Kobe made it back without Shaq and at least five future hall of famers played on the NBA’s biggest stage to renew the greatest rivalry of all time. The Celtics beat the Lakers, which only set the stakes higher for their rematch in 2010 to kick off the decade with five players who helped define the previous one. This series came down to what makes all series great: Game 7. On June 17th, 2010 the NBA’s two most storied franchises duked it out in a defensive grind em’ out low scoring old school game.

Seemingly no one could score with everything on the line and Kobe had a broken finger, but turned it on in the fourth quarter before passing up the shot to put the Lakers up for good to Metta World Peace (formerly known as Ron Artest), which caused Metta to iconically yell with joy after the game, “Kobe passed me the ball!”

Kobe and Pau’s Lakers became the first team to go back to back since… Kobe and Shaq’s Lakers as Kobe stood up on the scorer’s table with his arms outstretched like an eagle spreading its wings and confetti falling all around him for an NBA Finals moment that lives in history. Great players have great moments, and this was true history we got to witness.