‘He’s a winner:’ How Al Horford found his home and NBA glory

In the NBA’s free-agency period of 2016, as Kevin Durant left the Oklahoma City Thunder for the team that had beaten them in the Western Conference finals, selecting the Golden State Warriors over the Boston Celtics and other suitors, Al Horford did the opposite. He left the Atlanta Hawks for the team they had discarded in the first round of the playoffs, choosing Boston from a list that also included OKC.

It was a sliding-doors moment that transformed the Warriors into an unstoppable juggernaut and the Celtics into … well, something better than they were. Asked at Horford’s introductory news conference if the signing made Boston a contender, then-general manager Danny Ainge said, “We still have work to do.”

Those Celtics counted Isaiah Thomas as their only All-Star and Avery Bradley as their second-leading scorer. “The vision that I see here,” as Horford described it at the time, included a cache of draft assets, one of which they had just used on Jaylen Brown, that could be flipped for championship-caliber talent.

Horford was the biggest free agent ever to sign with the Celtics. They put their faith in one another, really knowing one truth about each other: They had won before, and they wanted to win again. Horford, a two-time NCAA champion, was looking for his first NBA title, and the Celtics sought their record 18th. Together they would figure this out. It would require patience. And luck. How much of both neither knew.

Nobody in NBA history would appear in more playoff games before winning his first championship than Horford, whose Celtics face the Dallas Mavericks on Saturday for the first time since beating them in the Finals in June.

Entering last season, Horford had played 167 career playoff games. Only Durant and LeBron James have played more among active players. Only 32 players ever had played more. They are, mostly, the all-timers. And only two of them — Karl Malone and John Stockton — had, like Horford, never won a championship.

As Malone and Stockton were to Michael Jordan, Horford had been to James. He lost his first 14 playoff games against James, who ended Horford’s season on five occasions, including every year from 2015-18. For as long as James had been compiling one of the great résumés in NBA history, there was Horford, a five-time All-Star, one of 13 players ever to log his statistical résumé — and somehow still The King’s foil.

Many legends of Horford’s generation teamed together to meet James at the mountaintop. At various points in various places Durant, Stephen Curry, Chris Paul, James Harden, Russell Westbrook, Kyrie Irving and more joined forces. Some have won championships; some not. You know the ones who have not.

As many of his peers traveled from place to place, rarely settling anywhere long enough to call home, often applauding as teams stripped their salary-cap sheets of young assets in service of one more chance for their impatient superstars, Horford took an active role in the development of the roster around him.

This is to say nothing negative about any of those other players. Just the opposite. Playoff losses are called “scars” for a reason. They hurt. No one plays 1,000 regular-season games and 100 playoff games not to win a championship. Harden, Paul, Westbrook, Jimmy Butler and Paul George are the only active players who fit that bill. They have won, a lot, only to lose in the end. How would it feel to see one win?

Asked how often he thinks about failing to win a title in his 18-year career, Reggie Miller once said, “Probably every day. It burns me. It burns me. People always want to talk about all the big shots, against New York, New Jersey, Chicago. I relive the shortcomings. I relive Game 7 in 1994, Game 7 in 1995, Game 7 in 1999. I relive those moments. Yeah, it burns me. It does. When people say they don’t regret it, they’re lying. I had a great career; I get it, but it probably wouldn’t hurt so much if I’d never been so close.”

To be a winner who has not won a championship is one of the most agonizing aspects of legendary sports careers. Had you stopped to consider Horford among them? Those who have known him did.

“He’s not doing anything to take away from the team ever,” Celtics GM Brad Stevens told Yahoo Sports. “It’s only about what’s best for the team, and it’s been that way since I’ve known him. When Billy Donovan talked about him, he talked about him that way. When his coaches in Atlanta talked about him, they talked about him that way. He’s a winner.”

Horford had been to the Eastern Conference finals in six of the previous nine seasons. His first 14 forays into the playoffs ended in defeat, as they do for most players, year after year, season after season, until your body is no longer game for the grind. And, like Miller, Horford had compiled his list of what-ifs.

In the summer of 2019, Horford’s Celtics met a crossroads. Following back-to-back Eastern Conference finals appearances, they lost in the second round of the playoffs. Irving, who arrived in 2017, was planning to leave, and the Philadelphia 76ers offered two things in free agency Ainge no longer could (or would) — near-max money and the chance to compete for a title. Boston’s cache of draft picks had yielded Jayson Tatum in addition to Brown, and suddenly swapping prospects for veterans was a less-enticing prospect.

“I was so surprised by JT’s rookie year, when Kyrie was out for us, and then Gordon [Hayward] was out,” says Horford of 2018. “Jaylen stepped up in a big way. He had some growth, but then Jayson as a rookie — not scared of the lights, bringing his game into the conference finals within four minutes of the fourth quarter of a Game 7 against LeBron [James] and Cleveland. We were right there, so when that happened, I just felt like, man, these guys — they’re young — but I feel like there’s some potential there. Absolutely.”

But as multiple sources said, a book could have been written about the dysfunction on the Celtics during Irving’s final year in Boston.

“It didn’t happen for us,” Horford told the Boston Herald in 2019, following his exodus from Boston, “and moving forward I didn’t know if it was going to be a two-year wait or whatever it was going to be.”

Staring his mid-30s in the mirror, Horford made the move to Philadelphia, signing his four-year, $109 million deal. He viewed the Sixers as his last, best chance at both a big contract and a ring. It was not.

Somehow Philadelphia failed to field a formidable frontcourt with future MVP Joel Embiid and the player who had defended him best. When the Horford-Embiid pairing produced a -0.5 net rating for one pandemic-shortened season, the 76ers cut bait, casting Horford — and a first-round draft pick — to the Oklahoma City Thunder for a since-retired Danny Green. If you cannot win with Al Horford, well then.

For their part the Thunder coveted the draft asset and pledged to work with Horford to find him a home, assuming he would not be a contributor whenever they came around to contending again.

Back in Boston, where the hastened development of Tatum and Brown had expedited Boston’s timeline, Stevens, who had replaced Ainge at the helm of the front office, was in the market for a veteran leader.

Who better than Horford?

On the playgrounds of the Dominican Republic, where he grew up, and Lansing, Michigan, where he spent his high school career at Grand Ledge, Horford, the eldest of six children, developed his leadership style, often serving as “all-time quarterback or all-time pitcher” in their childhood football and baseball games.

“He’d draw up plays with us, strategize,” says Horford’s younger brother, Josh. “He would usually be the one to gather us together to play different games and organize the teams. We were pretty rambunctious kids, too, so I think dealing with all of us could’ve prepared him a little. He also had a lot of responsibility on his high school team at Grand Ledge, and his teammates and even coaches really leaned on him.”

Horford was not a top-tier prospect when Billy Donovan recruited him to the University of Florida in 2004. Ranked 36th in his high school graduating class, Horford was listed among a number of players who never panned out. It took him three collegiate seasons to deliver the first bullet point to a Hall of Fame résumé, something no one else did for another two decades: back-to-back NCAA championships.

Get Stevens started on those Gators, and he reminds you, “Everyone talks about how good they were and how stacked they were, and that’s true, but it wasn’t the most ballyhooed recruiting class ever.”

What made them great could not be rated on a five-star system. It was an intangible that would come to define Horford’s career.

In Horford’s absence the Celtics finished the 2020-21 season with a .500 record and lost a gentleman’s sweep to Durant’s newest superteam, the Brooklyn Nets. Tatum and Brown had developed into All-Stars, but Kemba Walker, their veteran leader, was dealing with left knee injuries that would ultimately end his career.

Stevens needed a team with salary cap space to absorb Walker’s contract in exchange for a first-round draft pick. In Oklahoma City he rediscovered a bonus feature in return: Horford’s veteran stewardship.

“His impact on the locker room is real,” says Stevens. “In a lot of ways he is a calming force for the whole place. He has a perspective and a way about him that everybody really respects. When he speaks, everybody listens, and when people talk about great leaders I don’t think they talk about patience, and I’ve always been really struck by how patient Al is with a team needing to have time to come together. …

“He understands a long season. He understands the journey. He’s a big-time winner. So all of those things play a huge role in why anyone would want him, but we saw it firsthand when I was coaching. So obviously getting a chance to get him back was great.”

In the summer of 2021, Stevens’ first order of business as Boston’s newly crowned president of basketball operations: reacquire Horford, whom Stevens had coached to the 2017 and 2018 Eastern Conference finals. So it was that Horford’s 2021-22 Celtics started the year with a 22-22 record, only to jell midseason and make the franchise’s first run to an NBA Finals since the days of Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen — the days when Horford, as a rookie with Atlanta, pushed those championship Celtics to a Game 7 in the first round in 2008.

Horford understood the journey.

“As hard as it was, I had faith it was going to happen for me,” says Horford. “I had faith in God that he was going to put me in this position. … I felt like we were doing the right things, we were takings steps, and it just hadn’t happened for me. In this league it’s very unique when you have a real shot, and I felt like these last few years I’ve actually had real shots — that it’s took for me this many years to get to this point.”

Al Horford at the age of 35 was knocking on the door of his career goal when the Warriors, well after Durant’s departure, sent the Celtics home in six games. How quickly everything can change in the NBA.

But Horford, as he always has, stayed the course.

At the start of the 2023-24 campaign, he had made the playoffs every year of his 16-year career except in 2014, when a torn pectoral muscle limited him to 29 games, and 2021, when he played just 28 games for the Thunder, and each ended the same — in defeat.

From there it was about staying on the doorstep. With trades for Kristaps Porziņģis and Jrue Holiday, Boston had reestablished itself as a championship favorite, and it cannot be understated how much work it takes to prepare a 37-year-old body for the grind of another deep playoff run, let alone the mental toll.

As Horford says, “I’m doing everything I can to stay healthy, to feel good, so I can be a part of it.”

Horford may have been the best player on the floor to close out the Cleveland Cavaliers in last year’s East semifinals, totaling 22 points, 15 rebounds, five assists and three blocks in 35 minutes. Three games later he scored 23 points in Indiana to give the Celtics a 3-0 series lead against the Pacers. He was not coat-tailing Tatum and Brown; he was contributing alongside the players he shepherded to that point.

“Game 5 against Cleveland was maybe as good as I’ve seen him play in the time I coached him,” says Stevens. “The magnitude of that performance in that game was just really, really special. … I can’t say enough good things about him, and none of it is B.S. It’s all real.”

Back in the Finals for a second time in 2024, Horford started every game against the Mavericks in place of the injured Porziņģis, averaging 9.2 points and seven rebounds in 30 minutes per night. According to the NBA’s tracking data, Luka Dončić called Horford into the action on parts of 35 possessions; Dončić attempted 28 shots and made only nine of them, including one of his 13 3-point attempts.

As the clock wound down on Game 5, the Celtics leading 106-85, Horford switched from one Mavericks guard to another and back again as the last line of a pick-and-roll defense. No steps skipped. When the whistle blew, Joe Mazzulla subbed for Horford, who embraced everyone from his coach to the trainers.

It took 186 career playoff games for Horford to hoist the Larry O’Brien Trophy, and “nobody deserved it more than Al,” said Brown. “It’s been an honor to be by his side. Al Horford is a real-life legend and hero.”

“Al is for sure one of the best teammates I’ve ever had at any level,” Tatum said in their title’s aftermath. “I think about being 19 and coming in my first year and him taking me under his wing from a professional standpoint. I remember the first training camp. Every day after practice he would encourage me and ask me how I was feeling. … He paved the way for a lot of us, and it means the world to share this with him.”

“If you asked everybody,” says Stevens, “if you take all of the joy each one of us experienced winning last year, I think all of us would say a piece of that joy — if not a large portion of it in my eyes — was for Al.”

Horford’s path to glory is one every NBA player should wish he could wander, or at least everyone whose career is not played under the weight of all-time expectations. Among five-time All-Stars, only Jason Kidd, Gary Payton and Dwight Howard waited longer than Horford’s 1,078 games to win a first championship.

“It does make it sweeter, seeing the trajectory of Jayson and Jaylen and how they came along, how we built through them and were able to get to this point,” says Horford. “It doesn’t work like that a lot.”

As many of the superstars of Horford’s generation, especially James and Durant, approach the end of their careers, we wonder how they might script their final chapters and to which teams they belong.

But in Boston, Horford is reaping the rewards of his patience, entering every season with a chance for a championship — they are now second place to the Cleveland Cavaliers in this year’s Eastern Conference standings — so long as Tatum and Brown are firmly in their primes, and as long as he has that chance Horford will play, though he is taking his career year to year. But in Boston, Horford has found his home.

“I just want to be here,” says Horford.

And the feeling is mutual. “As long as Al Horford wants to play,” says Stevens, “we’ll want him here.”

Poll people around the Celtics, people who have influence over these things, and you cannot find anyone who does not think last year’s championship sealed two certainties for Horford: His No. 42 in the Garden rafters and, 90 miles to the West, his plaque on a wall in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

“I’m all for any accolades,” says Stevens.

James and Durant stamped their inductions into Springfield long ago, but if you are not a pantheon player, Horford’s career path is one many would trade for. He rode the grind as hard as anyone and was rewarded for it. Mentorship, longevity, greatness — marks of an 18-year career, bookended by back-to-back NCAA titles and the chance to do the same in the NBA.

His Celtics, following a blowout loss to James’ Los Angeles Lakers, are in a rough patch. They are 10-9 since mid-December. They own the NBA’s third-best record and third-best net rating. They are the only team ranked top-five in offensive and defensive efficiency. And they remain the champs until someone determines otherwise. But it is a rough patch, and we know on whose broad shoulders they will lean.