1960-61 NBA Finals

Result

Games

Finals MVP

The Finals MVP award was not introduced until 1969; no Finals MVP was named for this series.

Series context

The 1960-61 NBA Finals was a rematch of the previous year's championship series, and this time Boston made comparatively short work of it. The Celtics finished the regular season 57-22, edging out a strong St. Louis Hawks team (51-28) that was again led by Bob Pettit and Cliff Hagan. Boston won Game 1 easily, 129-95, and Game 2, 116-108, before the Hawks salvaged some pride with a 124-120 win in Game 3. But the Celtics closed the door quickly, winning Game 4, 119-104, and clinching the title with a 121-112 victory in Game 5 in St. Louis. Bill Russell was again the story defensively and on the glass, grabbing 31 rebounds in the opener and 38 in the closeout Game 5, while also contributing meaningfully as a scorer and passer. Hagan and Pettit both had big individual scoring nights for St. Louis, but Boston's depth and Russell's two-way dominance were too much to overcome. This series marked Bill Sharman's final NBA game, a fitting career sendoff for one of the era's great outside shooters as he helped close out the championship. This was the fourth and final Finals meeting between the Celtics and Hawks in that era, and it turned out to be the Hawks' last Finals appearance for decades to come (the franchise would later relocate, first to Atlanta), making this a historic bookend to one of the league's defining rivalries of the late 1950s and early 1960s. For Boston, it was the third consecutive title in what became an eight-year championship streak (1959-1966) and the fourth title overall for the franchise under Red Auerbach, extending their string of consecutive Finals appearances to five. The league itself remained a compact circuit at this point, still years away from the wave of expansion and the more famous Russell-Chamberlain Finals confrontations that would define the middle of the decade. Notably, this Finals fell in the same season that Russell won his second regular-season MVP award, further cementing his standing as the league's dominant force even without a formal Finals MVP honor to recognize his postseason excellence. St. Louis earned its trip to the Finals the hard way, needing seven games to eliminate the Los Angeles Lakers, then in just their second season on the West Coast, in the Western Division finals, a series that went down to a Game 7 in St. Louis on April 1. Boston's own path was comparatively smoother, dispatching the Syracuse Nationals in the Eastern Division playoffs before facing the Hawks. Both Boston and St. Louis had by this point become the league's marquee non-coastal rivalry of the era, having also met in the 1957, 1958, and 1960 Finals, with the Hawks the only team other than the Lakers to beat Boston in a championship series during Russell's career (in 1958, when Russell was hobbled by an ankle injury). This 1961 defeat, by contrast, closed the book on the rivalry for good: St. Louis has never returned to the Finals under any of its subsequent identities, first as the Hawks continued in St. Louis through the 1960s and then, after relocating to Atlanta in 1968, as the Atlanta Hawks, leaving 1961 as the franchise's last appearance in a championship series to this day.

Sources

• Wikipedia - 1961 NBA Finals
• Basketball-Reference - 1961 NBA Finals
• Wikipedia - 1961 NBA playoffs
• Basketball-Reference - 1961 Western Division Finals