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2022–23 Boston Celtics season

The 2022–23 Boston Celtics season was the franchise's 77th season in the National Basketball Association (NBA). The Celtics entered the season as the defending Eastern Conference and Atlantic Division champions, with hopes of claiming a record-breaking eighteenth NBA Championship, having lost to the Golden State Warriors in six games in the 2022 NBA Finals the season prior.

In the offseason, head coach Ime Udoka was suspended until June 30, 2023, for a violation of the team's code of conduct, following a team investigation into an inappropriate relationship between himself and a female Celtics staff member. Assistant coach Joe Mazzulla was named interim head coach on September 22, 2022. After 42 wins in the first 59 games of the season, Mazzulla was named the permanent head coach and signed to a contract extension on February 16, 2023. By the end of the season, the Celtics had managed to improve on their previous season's record by 6 games, finishing at 57–25, achieving their most regular season wins since 2009.

The Celtics qualified for the 2023 NBA playoffs as the 2nd seed in the Eastern Conference, behind the Milwaukee Bucks. Despite entering the postseason as modest favorites for the championship, the team struggled all postseason, taking six and seven games to win their first two series against the Atlanta Hawks and the Philadelphia 76ers, respectively (this being only the first time since 2018 that the Celtics took longer than four games to win a first round series, not counting 2021, in which they had lost in the first round), and nearly blowing a 2–1 lead in the latter series. Nevertheless, the Celtics advanced to the Eastern Conference finals for the fifth time in the last seven seasons. In this round, Boston faced their rivals the Miami Heat for the third time in four years, and quickly found themselves in trouble, going 0–3 down in the series, a position from which no team had ever advanced before. However, the Celtics refused to give up, and became only the fourth team in NBA history to force a Game 7 from such a position when Derrick White made a dramatic buzzer-beating putback layup at the end of Game 6, the first buzzer-beater made by a team trailing and facing elimination since Michael Jordan's famous 1989 shot against the Cleveland Cavaliers. Despite hopes of becoming the first NBA team to overcome a 0–3 series deficit, Boston failed to make history in Game 7, collapsing in a 103–84 home defeat, during which Jayson Tatum injured his ankle on the first play of the game, and ending their season just one win short of a return to the NBA Finals.