The defending champions will celebrate their 2024 NBA title with a banner and ring ceremony ahead of Knicks-Celtics at TD Garden in Boston.

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BOSTON (AP) — The Boston Celtics are giving themselves one more chance to celebrate their latest NBA championship before turning their attention to a repeat performance.

The league’s most decorated franchise will raise its 18th banner from the TD Garden rafters on Tuesday night before the season opener against the New York Knicks.7:30 ET, TNT). Players will also receive their championship rings during the pregame ceremony.

“It is a great achievement that we can do this. It’s going to be a great night,” guard Payton Pritchard said after practice on Monday. “But on the other hand, we were talking about doing it again. We need to reset that focus.

“We get the rings and then we want to go out there and prove that we are ready to make another statement.”

The Celtics cruised through the NBA regular season last year – finishing with the best record in the Eastern Conference with fourteen games – and then went 16-3 in the playoffs. Led by Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, they return their entire starting lineup and most of their bench, and are the favorites to win it all again.

Coach Joe Mazzulla has said he feels no pressure to repeat.

“We’ll all be dead soon, and it won’t really matter anymore. So there is no pressure whatsoever,” he said. “You have an opportunity to move the organization forward, to double down on the tradition and history of what this organization has. And what else would you expect than someone expecting you to win all the time?

“It’s not pressure,” he told reporters at the team’s practice facility. “There is nothing anyone in this circle can do to me that affects my identity and who I am as a person or as a coach. We’re either going to win or we’re not going to win, and in forty years none of you will be invited to my funeral, and that’s it.”

The Celtics won sixteen NBA titles between 1957 and 1986, of which Bill Russell won eleven in thirteen years. Dave Cowens and John Havlicek’s teams of the 1970s won a pair, and the Big Three of Larry Bird, Robert Parish and Kevin McHale won three more in the 1980s.

When Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen won it all in 2008, they ended the franchise’s longest title drought ever. They made it back to the NBA Finals two years later, but lost to the Lakers. (The period from 2008 to 2024 was the second longest drought.)

Pritchard said for the Celtics to be considered one of the greats, they still have to win one.

“A lot of people can do it once,” Pritchard said. “I know a championship is hard, but there are a lot of people who have won one. But winning multiple times and almost creating a dynasty is difficult. So that’s greatness, and that’s something we’re trying to achieve.”

The search begins against the Knicks, who have positioned themselves as Boston’s top competition in the East after acquiring Karl-Anthony Towns and Mikal Bridges last summer.

Mazzulla said he thinks his team will be ready.

‘I trust who they are. “I think they understand both ‘This is what we’ve accomplished’ and ‘This is what we’re trying to do,’” the coach said. “All the intangibles involved in winning have to carry over from one season to the next.”

“You have to appreciate it,” he said. “But you have to know what got you there, and if you forget what got you there, you’ll never come back.”