Apr 22, 2014; San Antonio, TX, USA; The Red Auerbach trophy that was presented to San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich after he was named the NBA

While the Celtics have had their fair share of coaching duds walk through the proverbial door – with an NBA-leading 17 championships – they’ve also had a healthy supply of Hall of Famers at the helm.

Behind each championship-winning Celtics teams – rife with All-Stars – was a Hall of Fame-caliber coach.

Although many of these Celtics squads have admittedly had the league’s best collection of players, we’ve repeatedly seen superior teams downed by lesser talents, due to the former team’s inability to ‘gel’.

As Larry Brown affirms, coaching is more about the management of egos than it is the drawing up of plays.

By the time athletes become professional, they’ve likely accumulated a substantial amount of praise, which, over time, generally fashions an enormous ego. While it’s healthy to be self-assured, you need somebody to harness each player’s confidence, and unite them with their teammates by fixating them on their common goal: winning.

In understanding how vital this is in order for a team to be successful, we may attribute a team’s success disproportionately more to the players than to the coaches. We’ll then inevitably recognize the names of the players on championship-winning teams then instead of the coach’s.

For example, how many casual Celtics fans know who Larry Bird is? Probably all of them. However, how many casual fans know who coached Larry Bird? Likely none of them.

The answer’s K.C. Jones. But the anonymity of some of these incredibly successful coaches is a fundamental problem with the way we perceive the game of basketball.

So in order to marginally correct this problem, I’m going to pay tribute to the Celtics’ coaches by distinguishing the Celtics top 5 coaches of all-time.

*Disclaimer: While I, like many of you, believe Brad Stevens is a basketball-savant, I think it’d be unfair to include him here, in lieu of other coaches – most of whom have won a substantially greater number of games than Stevens.