The 15 best players in the Celtics-Mavericks NBA Finals, ranked

The Mavericks and Celtics tip off Game 1 of the NBA Finals on Thursday night. Throughout the history of the NBA, the team that has had the best two or three players is the one that generally wins it all.

Michael Jordan’s Bulls, Larry Bird’s Celtics, Magic Johnson’s Lakers. The list goes on and on and on. That’s still somewhat the case today — the teams with the best player typically wins the series. But with so much of the star talent spread around the NBA these days, it’s less about the top two players on any given team and more about the next three through, say, seven or eight players that make such a big difference.

With that in mind, I thought it’d be a good exercise to rank the players in this series to see which roster stacks up as a better championship contender.

Here’s what I came up with: