Boston Celtics – When Walter Brown decided to bring a professional basketball team to Boston in 1946 he had a tough time coming up with a team nickname. According to Celtics.com, Brown was having a discussion with a member of the Boston Garden's publicity staff in which they threw around some relatively bad ideas like "Whirlwinds" and "Unicorns" before Brown came up with "Celtics," seemingly out of nowhere. There had been a barnstorming hoops team out of New York that went by that name in the 1920s, so he liked that it was a pre-established name in the basketball world, plus to this day Boston has the largest Irish population of any major city in the United States. Sixty-three years and seventeen championships later, that's still the name they're using. Hard to imagine Kevin Garnett in a Boston Unicorns jersey, right?
Links + histories for all other teams:
East: http://www.hoopsworld.com/Story.asp?story_id=13600
West: http://www.hoopsworld.com/Story.asp?story_id=13604
