The city is changing fast, and sports are more corporate than ever. But the way to win fans’ hearts is still to be the kind of player who makes his teammates better.
Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/ Globe Staff; Photos: Danielle Parhizkaran, Erin Clark, Jonathan Wiggs, Matthew J. Lee/Globe Staff, Brett Phelps for The Boston Globe, Maddie Meyer/Getty Images
Joon Lee, who has been a sportswriter for ESPN and The Washington Post,talks about sports on YouTube @iamjoonlee.
Derrick White is not the most famous player on the Celtics. He is not in the conversation for the next face of the NBA. He is not the athlete whose highlights dominate national commercials or whose quotes ricochet across national sports talk shows. And yet if you spend any time in Boston — walking past billboards, watching local television, stepping into a bar during a Celtics game, watching the local news — it is White you keep seeing on commercials, popping up with the frequency of another “Fast & Furious” sequel.
Boston has always prided itself on loving the “glue guys” — players like Brock Holt of the Red Sox, Marcus Smart of the Celtics, Shawn Thornton of the Bruins, and Julian Edelman of the Patriots, who do the little things like diving for loose balls, absorbing contact, and making the extra pass. They are the connective tissue of winning teams.
What’s new is how far that affection now extends. White is not just a fan favorite but a civic symbol, a commercial ambassador, and a face that brands trust to represent the city. White had spent most of his career as the kind of player whose value reveals itself slowly, but once he came to Boston, it didn’t take long.
“The love that they’re showing him is like [Boston] is trying to make up for lost time,” says Alex Welsh, White’s best friend, college teammate, and podcast cohost. “It feels like it’s makeup love because they recognize he hasn’t always got it.”
White is a guard who built his reputation on defense, feel, and sacrifice — the kind of player whose value is easier to understand if you’ve been paying close attention all along. So at a moment when Boston is still negotiating who it wants to be — more global, more polished, but still fiercely protective of its old values — White’s prominence is a telling reflection of what the city honors, what it rewards, and what it’s becoming.
When White first stepped onto the parquet of TD Garden in February 2022, he was a man in the middle of a private whirlwind. He had been traded from the San Antonio Spurs just hours earlier, leaving behind a dream house and a pregnant wife to board a flight into the unknown.
In the transactional churn of the NBA, players are often treated as mere assets in motion, but White recognized something different upon putting on a Celtics uniform. Over his first few weeks, he was mired in a shooting slump, a period of professional friction that might have turned a less discerning fan base against him. But inside TD Garden, the fan response told a different story. Steals drew roars. Deflections mattered.
“A couple months in, he started to realize, like, ‘OK, they like me, even though I’m shooting terribly.’” Welsh says. “Those little, small things that are generally unnoticed are under a spotlight in Boston.”
In Boston, those small things have always carried a mythic, almost sacred kind of currency. The late Celtics player and television commentator Tommy Heinsohn used to call them “Tommy Points” on broadcasts — unofficial credit for the plays that don’t headline a highlight package but quietly decide whether a team deserves to win: the loose-ball dive, the extra pass, the strip from behind. While much of the country treats those plays like a nice to have, in Boston, they are the meal.
Dart Adams, a Boston writer and historian who grew up in the basketball-obsessed South End, notes that in New York, basketball is a city game that exists in parks. In Boston, basketball culture is defined by the Celtics, rooted in the Red Auerbach era when the “sixth man” — the coach’s consistent choice for the first player to come off the bench — was invented and became the template players were taught to imitate.
Even the star center and captain Bill Russell, Adams points out, was revered in Boston not because he looked like the most talented scorer on the floor but because he treated winning like a craft — protecting the rim, setting the table, doing whatever the game demanded, even if it didn’t turn into a clean, ego-flattering line of points, rebounds, and assists in the box score.
“The way we were taught is that you have to tell me, first, if you won, how much you won by, and then tell us what you did for your team to win the game,” Adams says.
White isn’t from Boston. He grew up in Colorado, but almost immediately the way he played felt like a perfect fit for the city’s lineage of dirt dogs and glue guys.
“We didn’t look at players through the lens of ‘Oh, it’s a superstar, a star player,’” Adams says. “We looked at them as: Who plays like a Celtic?”
The spring of 2023 is when White proved he played like a Celtic. With the Celtics down 3-0 to the Miami Heat in the Eastern Conference finals, he authored the most Derrick White play imaginable — not a step-back three-pointer, but a refusal to concede a possession. As Marcus Smart’s final shot caromed off the rim in Game 6, White slipped inside and tipped it home at the buzzer. A year later, White broke a tooth in the NBA Finals, then returned to the floor without spectacle as the Celtics earned a championship.
And while White and his broken tooth will forever be tied to that championship run, his place in the city’s strange Mount Rushmore of glue guys could be cemented if the Celtics find themselves in another title chase.
Boston has a way of turning those players — scrappy guys who repeatedly will their teams to championships — into local myths. Edelman is the clearest modern example. Years after retiring, he remains woven into the city’s sports ecosystem — on podcasts, in the Patriots orbit, popping up in ads and marketing campaigns that still lean on the credibility he built catching passes over the middle. The biggest stars often drift away. Even Tom Brady was cagey about his rooting interests when the Patriots returned to the Super Bowl without him.
In Boston, the small things win a big audience. A deflection gets a roar, a hustle play gets remembered. Players who arrive from other cities sometimes realize the details of their job have suddenly moved closer to center stage.
“It almost gives purpose to players that haven’t been there before,” says the former Celtics player turned broadcaster Brian Scalabrine, whose on-court hustle made him a cult favorite.
It was in the months after the 2024 championship that White’s face began appearing everywhere: bank billboards, insurance spots, local television ads, the type of campaigns usually built around franchise cornerstones like David Ortiz. Sam Adams, the city’s most recognizable beer brand, chose him because the company felt he represented the evolution of the city.
“He isn’t this superflashy, in-your-face kind of person,” says John McElhenny, a marketing executive at Sam Adams who grew up in suburban Boston. “He’s a leader through his example. He just feels like one of us.”
Boston is not the same city it was when Tommy Heinsohn was handing out Tommy Points. The Seaport is glass and steel now. There are always cranes on the skyline. Venture capital and biotech offices rise on both sides of the Charles. The city has globalized faster than its mythology.
Even the city’s iconic accent is slowly disappearing.
At the same time, Boston is no longer a city defined solely by birthright. The city’s energy now belongs, in large part, to a more diverse group of transplants — young professionals who arrived for school, for work, for opportunity and who chose to stay. That arc — outsider to insider through competence — is increasingly the story of Boston itself. Boston used to treat belonging as inheritance. Now it treats it as proof of work.
“The city has decided to embrace and show off different sides of itself” that it hasn’t been able to do before, Adams says.
Cities reveal themselves in the kinds of athletes they turn into symbols. New York markets spectacle. Los Angeles sells glamour. Miami trades in flash. Boston, even as it courts private equity and biotech capital, still insists that it values effort over ego.
In an era when teams are run like assets and loyalty feels conditional, Derrick White is reassurance. He is the reminder Boston wants to give itself: that sacrifice still matters, that work still speaks louder than hype, that the smallest play can be still the biggest deal.
Maybe that’s why he’s everywhere. Because of what he represents: a reminder that effort still matters. That’s why the Celtics’ most beloved player is a guard who dives on the floor for loose balls.