So picture this: it’s June 17, 2008. The Boston Celtics have just smoked the Lakers in Game 6 of the NBA Finals. Completely crushed them. Final score? 131-92. The Garden was electric, confetti rained down like a New England blizzard, and the Big Three, Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, and Ray Allen, were on top of the world. The champagne was flowing, the locker room smelled like victory, and everything was exactly how it should’ve been after a title win. Except it wasn’t.

Somehow, in the middle of all the chaos, one very determined fan slipped past security, tiptoed through the madness, and ended up in the Celtics’ locker room. Yes! In. The. Locker. Room. The fortress of team solitude, the ground zero.

Now, in an episode of The Ticket and The Truth Podcast, available on YouTube,  Kevin Garnett shed light on the infamous incident. He said, “So it’s pandemonium P stand up on the sh*t almost fall we got to help. He get the MVP, we all going crazy. We got to do media, all of a sudden it slows down. It’s just slowing down so we all kind of like land. I think I see TA’s boy, I see Perk’s boy, Paul got cuz over here…. And this one guy is just sitting here drinking, mentioning how the individual was not familiar to anybody, but no one questioned him yet, because he seemed oddly calm there.“

Finally coming to their senses, they asked the individual a few questions. Kevin Garnett promptly recounted, “We’re in like a training room now, so it’s just me, you, Ed Lynchie… it’s like seven to eight of us and it’s like all the people we know… but how he’s sitting he’s comfortable he’s sitting just chilling so we sit here about an hour go by… finally Paul goes, ‘Man, who – who you with man?’ He’s he’s like, ‘I’m just here man. I’m just a fan.’ We went, ‘What?’ And Lynchie, who is our security at that time, goes, ‘What?’ He reached… he said, ‘Whoa, hold on, get you get your a** up out of here.’ I was like, ‘Whoa, Lynch, leave him alone.’ Man, they threw him out so fast.” Thankfully, the fan was only ejected, and nothing untoward happened.

However, this story does not align with Ray Allen’s account. Ray Allen describes the incident similarly. But, instead of the fan getting reprimanded and removed from the locker room, he says that everybody busted out laughing and he said, “Buddy, if you’re still in here, if you made it in here, you deserve to be here.” Two very conflicting accounts of two individuals who were there in the same locker room.

However, there is another infamous incident that happened during the 2008 NBA Finals. Keen followers already know about the ‘wheelchair incident’ but for the uninitiated, let us see what happened.

Paul Pierce and the unforgettable finals wheelchair incident

Ah yes, the wheelchair game. Game 1 of the 2008 NBA Finals—Celtics vs. Lakers, a rivalry straight out of hoops mythology. And then, boom, Paul Pierce goes down. He crashes into Kendrick Perkins, grabs his knee, and the crowd at TD Garden just freezes. It looked bad. Like season-ending bad. Next thing you know, he’s being wheeled off the court. In an actual wheelchair. I mean, the guy looked like he might never walk again, let alone play again. The whole arena went from electric to dead silent.

But here’s where it gets legendary. Just a few minutes later—minutes—Pierce comes jogging out of the tunnel like he’s Rocky Balboa. No limp, no hesitation, just full-on comeback energy. The crowd explodes. He re-enters the game, hits back-to-back threes, and completely shifts the momentum. The Celtics ride that wave all the way to a Game 1 win.

And the man? He goes on to win Finals MVP. Now, here’s the thing, people still debate what really happened. Some say it was all drama. Others, including Pierce himself, in later interviews, joked that it might’ve just been… well, nature calling. Yeah, that kind of emergency.

Regardless, that moment stuck. It became part of his legacy, for better or worse. What more could fans ask for? Pierce pulled off one of the wildest in-game returns ever. And the Celtics? They ended up raising banner 17. So whatever he did in that locker room, it worked. And then, little did they know what awaited them in the locker room after their victory.