Mike Celizic

The team names — the Celtics and the Lakers — are pure magic to fans and ratings gold to the NBA and ABC. But let’s face it, these are not your father’s Lakers and Celtics, and they’re not your grandfather’s, either.

Your grandfather had Sam Jones, Bill Russell, John Havlicek and Bob Cousy wearing Celtics green. In the purple and gold were Jerry West, Elgin Baylor and, finally, Wilt Chamberlain.

For your father, the names were Larry Bird, Kevin McHale and Robert Parish for the lads from Boston and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson and James Worthy for Jack Nicholson’s favorite team.

There’s only one player on both teams combined this year whose name fits in with those stars of yore — Kobe Bryant. And even the best player in today’s NBA might have to take fourth or fifth billing behind Russell, Magic, Chamberlain, and probably Bird. That could change by the end of Bryant’s career, but right now that’s where he is.

And as good as today’s Lakers are, how many of them other than Kobe could have played with West and Chamberlain, with Kareem and Magic? Derek Fisher could have been a back-up on those great teams, as could Pau Gasol. But they wouldn’t have been starters.

As for today’s Celtics, who would you rather have, Kevin Garnett or Havlicek? Paul Pierce or McHale? Allen or Jones? Pierce could have played on those old teams, but Garnett would have to get a whole lot tougher to get the approval of a Russell.

I’m not putting down the current versions of the game’s most celebrated franchises. They’re the two best teams in the game, and both took out former champions in their respective conference finals. Kobe is the NBA’s best player and a future Hall of Famer, as are Pierce and Garnett on the Celts. Neither team has to apologize for where they are and how they got there.

But the difference in the quality of the rosters between then and now is striking. Those guys were all-time legends. With the exception of Kobe, none of these guys are going to ever be listed among the top 25 athletes ever to play the game. It’s like everything else in sports these days — nothing is the way it once was. That’s a natural fact.

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There isn’t much sense crying over it. The good old days gave us a Celtics team that won eight straight titles and nine in 10 years. From a fan’s perspective, no team in any sport has ever been that good. But while fans may want to go back to those thrilling days of yesteryear, players want no part of them.

The reason the Celtics could build their great team was because there was no free agency, so every team could keep all its players. Since players couldn’t jump to new teams, there was no reason to throw bazillions of dollars at them to make them stay. Where were they going to go?

Today, players can not only move around, there’s also a salary cap that makes it impossible to keep together a team of all-stars. You can no more keep guys like Havlicek, Cousy, Russell and Jones together today than you can keep Keith Olbermann from taking shots at Bill O’Reilly. There isn’t enough money in any team’s coffers to afford them — even if the league allowed it.

From a player’s perspective, the modern way of doing things is a lot better. In the good old days, the players pretty much took whatever management gave them. Playing professional sports was a good job 40 years ago, but it didn’t pay that much more than a good job in the real world. As much as fans may want to go back to those thrilling days of yesteryear, players want no part of it.

In the old days, Shaquille O’Neal would still be on the Lakers, because there was no way he could go somewhere else and no way that Kobe’s opinion of Shaq would have had any effect on management. If he didn’t like it, tough.

Special feature Rivalry renewed The Lakers and Cetics are meeting for the 11th time in NBA Finals history. NBCSports.com

Maybe the Lakers would have had a few more titles if Shaq had stayed around. And they certainly wouldn’t have almost lost Kobe in the off-season. Management wouldn’t even have considered it.

The upside of all of this is that you can rest assured that 40 years from now, we’ll be saying the same things. The teams then won’t be as good as the teams today, the Celtics’ Big Three will be celebrated as a combination that will never be seen again, and people may even talk about Kobe the way we talk about Russell and Magic and Bird and Kareem today.

They’re the greatest franchises and today they’re the greatest teams. And if they’re not like they used to be, who among us is?

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