In the previous twenty-five installments of this series we traced the first half-century of the Houston Oilers basketball beginning with their relocation from Rochester, New York in 1957 and continuing up to the team’s 50th anniversary celebrations and successful NBA championship run in 2007. In this chapter we’ll look back at the run-up to their 2008 NBA Finals clash with the Boston Celtics.

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The Oilers opened their fifty-first NBA season in Houston with an impressive six-game winning streak. It was the third game of the streak that was the most satisfying as far as Oilers fans were concerned; not only did it happen on the same night that the team’s 2006-07 NBA league championship banner was hoisted to the rafters at the Sonic Center, it came against the highly despised Dallas Mavericks, a team whose rivalry with Houston was almost as intense as the legendary Red Sox-Yankees feud in baseball or the Manchester United-Arsenal vendetta in soccer. Even when Houston’s six-game streak was finally snapped by a nine-point loss against the Minnesota Cyclones, morale among the Oilers players and their fans remained high. The general feeling in the first weeks of the ’06-’07 season was that the sky was the limit-- and as the season progressed it got increasingly difficult to find people who would dispute that assessment.

Around Thanksgiving weekend the Oilers arrived in Boston for the start of an eight-game East Coast road swing. Although it had been years since the Oilers and the Celtics had butted heads in an NBA Finals series, the Houston-Boston rivalry still burned as intensely as it had during the heyday of the Auerbach years at the old Boston Garden. And in the offseason, the Celtics had made two huge player acquisitions that promised to turn up the volume on the rivalry further still: former Minnesota Cyclones standout Kevin Garnett and ex-Seattle Mariner Ray Allen, both of whom had sizable talent and equally sizable grudges against the Oilers. By the time of the opening tipoff it seemed as if the clock had been turned back four decades; Garnett and Allen’s aggressive loathing toward Houston seemed to have rubbed off on their new teammates as the Celtics came out with their metaphorical guns blazing away at the Oilers.

When the smoke finally cleared, Houston found itself on the wrong end of a 97-83 score and both they and the Celtics had had at least two players foul out before the end of the game due to multiple altercations between the C’s and the Oilers. To add insult to injury from Houston’s perspective, John Lucas had been ejected from the game near the end of the third quarter after he disputed a foul call with the senior referee. As they departed TD Garden to catch their charter flight out of Logan Airport back to Houston, the Houston players promised themselves that they would avenge the embarrassment the next time they took on the Celtics; in the process they would set the stage for one of the most hard- fought NBA Finals series in the league’s history.

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The 2007-08 Oilers were one of the first NBA teams in the league’s history to have their own Facebook page; with the NBA looking to tap into the power of social media like Facebook as a means of expanding the league’s fan base, Houston had decided the time was right for the Oiler franchise to plunge into the social media pool. Scores of unofficial Oilers-themed pages had existed on Facebook almost since the network’s creation, but the team had never an official FB site until now. Predictably, the Oilers’ new official Facebook page racked up a massive hit count the moment it went online. Within just seventy-two hours after the page was launched it had already crossed the 2 million hits threshold, and after a week it was up to 4 million.

Those pages bore witness to a regular season for the ages. The Oilers registered their second-best regular season record in franchise history and racked up their 850th consecutive home game sellout as they fought to hold on to the O’Brien Trophy they had won the previous season. For the rest of the Western Conference, the ’07-’08 campaign was essentially a fight for second place as Houston had the top spot in the conference all but wrapped up. As the clock ticked down to the final weeks of the season, the main topics of conversation among pro basketball aficionados all over the Energy City were (A)who the Oilers would have to steamroll in the early rounds of the playoffs in order to advance to the 2008 Western Conference finals and (B)who their most likely opponents would be in the league finals.

The second question turned out to be easier to resolve than the first; the Sacramento Kings, who’d gotten off to a poor start in the ’07-’08 NBA regular season and at one point faced the all- too-real possibility of getting knocked out of playoff contention altogether, surged past the Seattle Mariners near the end of the season to clinch the final Western Conference postseason slot. In the process, they upset a lot of office betting pools and made a liar out of at least half the basketball writers in America. (To say nothing of the effects they had on the digestion of Mariners fans who had the misfortune to be reading the box scores of those season-ending games during breakfast the next morning.)

But while the Oilers’ first-round opponent was a bit of a surprise, the identity of their second-round antagonists seemed to be almost preordained in the minds of fans and sportswriters alike; with the Dallas Mavericks now involved in a genuine and (to say the least) intense rivalry with Houston, they’d kept on tweaking their lineup to improve it for the ’08 playoffs, and as a result they would once again be going head-to-head against the Oilers. And it would, to be sure, be a slugfest in every sense of the word-- indeed, before Houston’s second-round series with the Mavericks was over the Oilers would come breathtakingly close to tying their long-standing club record for most team fouls during a playoff series.

And then there was Houston’s eventual Western Conference finals opponent, the Lakers. Prior to the start of the 2007-08 NBA season Los Angeles head coach Phil Jackson had set it as one of his primary goals for the year to end the Oilers’ reign as NBA league champions. His star player, Kobe Bryant, had inflamed the wrath of Oilers fans during the regular season by trash-talking the Houston franchise at every opportunity. Last but not least, on the eve of the first game of the ’08 Oilers-Kings series, one of L.A.’s better-known sportswriters boldly predicted Sacramento would send Houston packing in four games.

Big mistake-- the Oilers players and coaching staff used that prediction as bulletin-board motivation to turn the tables on the Kings and send them packing. A shell-shocked Sacramento, unable to cope with the firsd-up Houston squad, was swept out of the first round in three straight games; the day after Houston’s series-clinching Game 3 victory, Sacramento’s head coach and his two most senior assistants were all fired. The momentum from the Oilers’ sweep of the Kings would carry them to a six-game triumph over Dallas in the second round and a five-game squashing of the Lakers in the 2008 Western Conference finals.

When Houston punched their ticket to the 2008 NBA Finals, visions of past Oilers playoff clashes with the Boston Celtics started dancing in NBA fans’ heads. Though it had been more than two decades since the C’s had last tangled with Houston for the NBA league championship, memories of that struggle and many other previous Boston-Houston showdowns in the Finals still resonated for countless basketball aficionados in both cities-- and a lot of other places for that matter. Oilers head coach John Lucas and his Celtics counterpart, former Atlanta Knights star Glenn “Doc” Rivers, were both familiar enough with their NBA history to know the subtexts lying just beneath the surface of this latest battle between the Green Machine and Houston.

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Given the history between the Oilers and the Celtics, it was perhaps inevitable that this latest showdown between the old rivals would be hyped like a heavyweight boxing title match-- one Houston sports publication actually printed a mock poster showing John Lucas and Doc Rivers in boxing attire and captioned “OILERS VS. CELTICS: THE TUSSLE FOR THE TROPHY”. Though many of those who would suit up for Game 1 of the 2008 NBA Finals were newcomers to the hype surrounding the Celtics-Oilers rivalry, they would bring every degree as much passion to it as any of the old-time Celtics or Oilers greats ever had....