The Los Angeles Lakers and the Boston Celtics are indisputably the greatest franchises in National Basketball Association history. Their rivalry, spanning 50 years, is one of the most intense in international sporting history and, at its zenith in the 1980s, was responsible for transforming the NBA from a fringe organisation into the worldwide commercial powerhouse it is today.

When Boston Celtics captain Paul Pierce swept his side to a comprehensive 131-92 win in the sixth and final game of the 2008 NBA finals series, he wasn’t just clinching his side its record-breaking 17th championship. He wasn’t just spearheading the largest point differential in any climactic game in NBA finals history either. He was bringing the curtain down – emphatically – on the latest instalment of the most thrilling, enduring and storied rivalries in the history of basketball.

Pierce was voted the NBA Most Valuable Player for 2008, as his side beat the Los Angeles Lakers by four games to two in the finals to take the franchise’s first championship since 1986. The fact that victory had been sealed at the expense of the Lakers made it all the more sweet for Pierce and the Celtics.

Indeed, Pierce, a basketball veteran at 31, had grown up as a Lakers fan on the streets of California. The fact that he would accomplish the greatest individual feat of his career against the club he supported as a boy with their fiercest rivals was a delicious irony not lost on the spin doctors at the NBA.

The Los Angeles Lakers and the Boston Celtics are the two undisputed giants of club basketball. Of the 62 championships in NBA history, the two teams have won 31 of them. The Celtics lead the Lakers on total championships won, 17 – 14. Despite the fact that the Lakers have won just two of the 11 NBA finals series contested between the two teams, the sheer frisson between the franchises is such that theirs is one of the most enduring and intense rivalries in American, if not world, sporting history.

Of course, there is no shortage of historic and enduring sporting contests: Barcelona against Real Madrid in soccer; Pakistan against India in cricket; America against Europe in Ryder Cup golf – all can claim to rival the Lakers against the Celtics in terms of history and passion. But no rivalry has meant as much to its sport as the 50-year long battle fought across the hardcourts of Boston and Los Angeles. A reminder of that rivalry can be heard at almost every Celtics home game when the crowd falls back on its trusty ‘Beat LA’ chant, regardless of the opponent.

Indeed, such is the intensity of the Celtics-Lakers rivalry that it has spilled over into other sports. A sense of heightened competitiveness has transcended basketball, trickling through into both Major League Baseball (MLB) and the National Hockey League (NHL). Taking their lead from the Lakers and the Celtics, there is always an extra spark, an added ferocity, to fixtures between the Boston Red Sox and the LA Angels of Anaheim in baseball and the Boston Bruins and LA Kings in ice hockey.

The Minneapolis Lakers were the first dynasty in the history of the NBA (which had been formed in 1946), winning no fewer than five titles between 1949 and 1954. However, new limits on fouling disrupted the slow style of play that had served them so well. If people didn’t believe that the first period of dominance wasn’t shattered by the time the Lakers first met the Boston Celtics in a finals series in 1959, they soon would. Indeed, the 1959 finals saw the Celtics steamroller the Lakers four games to none. In one of those first clashes between the two future titans, Celtics point guard Bob Cousy made 28 assists, setting a league record that stood for some 20 years.

Indeed, the 1959 championship was to be the first brick in the biggest NBA dynasty of them all. The Celtics’ win in 1959 was followed by seven more consecutive championship wins – to the intense chagrin of the Lakers, five of those eight were at their expense.

The 1959 humiliation might have brought an end to the beginning for the Lakers but it also sparked the move that would shape the team’s future. On the back of the defeat, Lakers owner Bob Short decided to move the franchise from Minneapolis to Los Angeles, becoming the first West Coast NBA team in the process. The ‘Lakers’ moniker, drawn from the lakes of Minneapolis, stuck, despite the comparative aridity of the team’s new home in California; an amusing precedent that would be repeated when the New Orleans Jazz franchise upped sticks to Utah.

It was in the 1960s that the rivalry was truly born – the Celtics defeating the newly-homed Lakers in six of that decade’s finals series. The Lakers, struggling to endear themselves to their new fanbase in LA, cultivated an ever-deeper resentment with each defeat to their Boston rivals.

Yet not one of those six victories was easy for Boston. Two of the series would go to six games, and two more the full way to seven. Indeed, it was during the 1962 finals, still remembered as some of the most closely contested games in NBA history, that the roots of the rivalry really began to set themselves. That series saw the first sprinkles of Hollywood glitz infuse the tie as Pat Boone and Doris Day were in the LA crowd. The sides shared the first four games before Lakers forward Elgin Baylor scored a mammoth 61 points in the fifth game to give LA the series lead. Boston fought back in the next game to set up a nail-biting finish in the seventh and final match. In a game that set the mould for all basketball heart-stoppers in the future, the scores were tied at 100-all at the end of regulation time. A Bill Russell-inspired Boston eventually took the tie, and the championship, 110-107, with Russell himself taking a remarkable 40 rebounds and 30 points.