NBA playoffs 2023 - The Miami Heat and Boston Celtics have postseason history -- a lot of it - ESPN

Editor's note: This story was originally published in May 2022 and has been updated to reflect Boston and Miami facing each other in the 2023 Eastern Conference finals.

To understand the depths of animosity between the Miami Heat and Boston Celtics entering this year's NBA Eastern Conference finals, you have to go back to an otherwise nondescript regular-season night in March 2013.

That night in New Orleans, a Heat public relations official approached the team's traveling media contingent with a message from team president Pat Riley that would immediately go into the annals of history.

«Danny Ainge needs to shut the f--- up and manage his own team,» Riley said, via that hand-delivered statement. «He was the biggest whiner going when he was playing and I know that because I coached against him.»

For Riley, the animosity wasn't just about Ainge criticizing then-Heat star LeBron James and his tendency to complain about officiating. Riley's beef with Ainge, and the entire Celtics organization, was personal.

While he has spent nearly three decades as the godfather of Heat basketball, lording over one of the league's most successful and stable franchises, Riley cut his teeth as a player and coach with the Los Angeles Lakers and spent many years duking it out for championships with their rivals in Boston.

As Riley's Heat have consistently stationed themselves among the East's elite over the past two decades, the team most often pitted against them has been the Celtics.

The rivals square off in Game 1 on Wednesday at Boston's TD Garden (8:30 p.m. ET, TNT), meeting in the conference finals for the third time in four seasons — this is Miami's ninth and Boston's eighth trip to the East finals over the past 19 seasons — and that