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GOTHAM’S CITY
Coming off the NBA Finals, Celtics president Rich Gotham talks about his Celtic pride.
The day after the Boston Celtics dropped game six to come up short in the 2022 NBA Finals, Rich Gotham was back at his desk in TD Garden scheming up new ways to give the team the economic firepower to make another championship run in 2023. The longtime president of the Celtics, the Boston-born Gotham runs the business side of the team in green, overseeing everything from season ticket sales to television network deals. Since he joined the organization in 2003, the Celtics’ business side has grown exponentially, supercharged in part by a championship banner in 2008 and an ever-fierce fan base. Prior to arriving on Nantucket for his well-deserved summer vacation, Gotham spoke to N Magazine about his history with the team, his plans for next season and what he thinks it will take to raise an eighteenth championship banner.
What’s your connection to Nantucket?
We bought a place out in Madaket in 2004 and sold it in ’21. So we were there for about seventeen years. Prior to buying the home out there, we were regular vacationers. In fact, the first vacation we took on Nantucket was about two months after my daughter was born. She’s twenty-six now and she’s been there every summer of her life since. So we’ve been longtime summer Nantucket folks.
Are you considering buying back onto the island?
We've thought about it. We sold during the pandemic at a time when the market was seemingly as hot as it could get, and then it just continued to go straight up from there. So I think we’d probably sit it out for a little while. But we’re out there for a couple weeks this August with a vacation rental on Cliff. Nantucket gets in your blood. You can’t really just leave it behind.
Did you grow up as a diehard Celtics fan?
Like a lot of people, the Celtics really became a passion when Larry Bird came to town in the late seventies and early eighties. I didn’t grow up playing a lot of basketball. My passion for basketball was those eighties Celtics teams. If you grow up in Boston, all four teams are in your blood. I was a huge Red Sox, Bruins and Patriots fan as well, but the Celtics were the team that I identified with the most.
So becoming president of the Celtics must have been a dream come true?
Interestingly, I never engineered my path into sports. It wasn’t something I was consciously trying to achieve. I had a fifteen-year career in the tech industry before I joined the Celtics. I was with an East Coast internet company named Lycos, which was a first-generation search engine before Google was a verb. Getting into sports was not something that I had really even considered.
Given your lack of professional sports experience, why were you a good fit for the position?
As a lifelong Celtics fan, and someone who just really had this connection with the team and what the team represented—the ethos, the values, the Celtics’ pride—I had a good feeling for what it was all about. That was really a good compass for me in understanding the responsibility of working for the Celtics and helping to lead the Celtics. What has always driven me more than anything is wanting our fans to be proud of their team—because I was a fan first.
You took over for Red Auerbach as president after he passed away in 2006. What pressure did you feel stepping into his shoes?
When you’re following someone like Red Auerbach, who was pretty much the Ben Franklin of basketball, you try to avoid any comparisons. You understand that Red’s role and your role are two very different things. You do your best to try to help the Celtics in their mission, which has always been raising championship banners. So I can’t say I felt pressure other than the self-imposed pressure to have a team and an organization that our fans can be proud of. There’s always been pressure to do that.
In the sports industry, a tenure as long as yours is pretty rare. What would you attribute that longevity to?
I think we’ve built something at the Celtics that’s been successful. We’ve put a group of people together who work together well. Our ownership has been fantastic in supporting us on the business side and on the basketball side. I’ve only really had two different partners on the basketball side, in Danny Ainge and now Brad Stevens—both people that I think really highly of and have great relationships with, which makes it easier to want to be here. We’ve only had three coaches during my tenure here: Doc Rivers, Brad Stevens and now Ime Udoka. Three super guys. Great coaches but great people as well. Having those kinds of people around you, and the team we’ve built here on the business side as well, that’s what keeps you going.
How do you reset after a season like this past one?
The interesting thing about sports and about basketball, and what we’ve experienced as the Celtics, every year is a new chapter. So when you have a season like we just had where we went to game six of the NBA Finals, it’s a success by most measures, but ultimately, our goal is not to come in second. Our goal is to raise banner eighteen. That always motivates you to come back for another season. Unless you’re the one who’s raising the trophy, you’re never truly happy. There’s always that hope for what we’re able to accomplish the next season, and that’s certainly how I feel today.
Which of the great teams of the past do you think the current Celtics roster compares closest with?
It’s really hard, because the game and the way the game is played has changed so much. It’s hard to compare this team, for instance, even to the 2008 team. The 2008 team was a veteran team with a bunch of really big personalities. This team is quieter. They don’t have that big personality that the 07–08 championship team had. And it’s hard to compare any teams to those eighties Celtics, which were some of the best teams to ever play the game.
What do most fans not know about Celtics star forward Jayson Tatum?
Because Jayson has a very calm, quiet persona, people may not understand just how driven and how hardworking he is. He’s a twenty-four-year-old guy—still very young by almost any standard—and he’s accomplished so much. He really wants to be great and is willing to put the work in. What you don’t really see as a fan is how much work he puts in behind the scenes. We’re lucky that both he and [guard] Jaylen Brown, arguably our two best players, are also our two hardest-working players.
A big X-factor in this year’s NBA Finals that received a lot of press was Celtics fans throwing off players like Golden State’s Draymond Green with what some have condemned as lewd chants. What are the positives and the negatives of having such a fervent fan base?
I don’t really see any negatives to be honest with you. I know sometimes the language can get a little salty, but you have to take the whole package with the Boston fans. When you travel to other arenas across the league for big games—even for playoff games—what always strikes you is that they’re never as excited and as loud and as supportive as the Boston fans are. It’s just something that makes Boston unique. It’s what makes the Celtics unique. When you go into a Celtics playoff game, our fans are there chanting an hour before the game. They’re just ready to go right from the jump. If one of the byproducts is that they’re getting on another team’s player in ways that might include questionable language, it’s hard to fault them for it.
Have there been instances, or maybe even in discussions now with looking to acquire new players, where that fan base can be prohibitive to a new player coming to Boston?
No, I think just the opposite. I think players come to Boston and they say, “Wow, I’ve never seen anything like this. I’ve never experienced anything like this.” Even if they’re on the receiving end of some of the hostility, they know it’s because the fans have passion. There are a lot of players who come through here and have said, “You don’t know you’re in the NBA until you’ve played in Boston.” And it’s true because it’s a different environment when you step inside the TD Garden than it is any place else in the league.
Boston is the leader in so many different sectors from technology to education to real estate development. Will the sports business always thrive in this city?
I do believe that. When I joined the Celtics, I looked at the Celtics as this unique, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity—but I didn’t really look at it as a growth business. I was wrong. It’s really been a growth business and that’s been true for the other teams in this town as well. You can see what’s grown around the Celtics. And not just from a mixed-use real estate development standpoint; the neighborhoods have developed and grown. The economic impact on a game-by-game basis to the city is huge. There’s a lot more intellectual capital around the sports business than there ever has been. It’s become a more sophisticated technology business. There’s a whole sports technology innovation movement in and around Boston. There are incubators for sports technologies. There’s a whole economy that’s kind of grown up and built around what we do, and it’s a lot bigger than just the teams themselves. So I do think sports are a legitimate industry for Boston, and more so, they’re so integrated into the culture of the city, that I don’t really see that changing. I see that only growing.
I think the trend continues. I think all the leagues, all the teams are growing. The reach that we have at the Celtics is not just a local or national reach. It’s a truly global reach. Celtics fans can follow us in over two hundred countries and fifty different languages. We reach hundreds of millions of people through our social media channel—twenty million Celtics fans and followers around the globe. So it’s gone from being what you might consider to be a local or a regional business to a truly global business, and that’s where a lot of the growth has come from.
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