NBA Alchemy: Green + Purple = Gold

My aging, early-to-bed friends had barely finished rejoicing over the Boston Celtics' return to the NBA finals after a 21-year absence—with the bonus of a renewal of the team's rivalry with the Los Angeles Lakers—when they started griping about the post-9 p.m. ET tipoffs that guarantee the league its own brand of midnight madness.

These old-timers have obviously forgotten that when Magic Johnson and Larry Bird entered the NBA almost 30 years ago, the league was at its nadir. Its dwindling fan base was forced to watch the finals on tape delay—kind of the same status as Australian rules football—starting at the ungodly hour of 11:30 p.m. It was the double dazzle of Magic and Larry Legend that rescued pro basketball and, with Michael Jordan as a high-flying punctuation mark, made the league a decidedly prime-time affair.

MJ may have ultimately soared above all, but it was Johnson's Lakers and Bird's Celtics that delivered the game's consummate entertainment. I treasure every memory, the yin and the yang of it: the brutality (for Celtics fans, anyway) of Magic's game-winning mini-sky hook that propelled the Lakers to the '87 title, the last time the two teams met in the playoffs; the elegance of  Kevin McHaleclotheslining Kurt Rambis as he drove for a layup, a foul that was credited with reversing momentum for the Celtics en route to the '84 championship. If you're looking for a measure of how much the NBA has changed in 25 years, it is not the disappearance of the skyhook from the offensive repertoire but rather how McHale's foul, de rigueur in its day, would today rate an ejection and a suspension.

The '80s, with three Lakers-Celtics finals over four seasons and a combined eight titles for the teams (L.A. five, Boston three), were a heady time for the NBA game. But trust me, on the court it had nothing on that same rivalry from the '60s—six finals between Boston and L.A. in eight seasons, each won by the Celtics during their dynastic run. For all the '80s star power of Magic, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and James Worthy vs. Larry, Kevin and Robert Parrish, those '60s teams could match them, perhaps even surpass them with basketball immortals: Bill Russell, Bob Cousy and John Havlicek wearing the green vs. Elgin Baylor, Jerry West and, later, Wilt Chamberlain in purple.

Through the haze of history and the blur of almost half a century of sports, I remember 1962, that first finals encounter, as if it were yesterday. Most of all I remember Frank Selvy. The Lakers had been the dominant team of the nascent NBA in the '50s, winning five titles in six years behind the league's first dominant center, George Mikan. But all those championships were won in Minneapolis, before the team's 1961 move to that noted lake country, Los Angeles. (The "L.A. Lakers" was a precursor of the foolishness that later would turn the New Orleans team into the Utah Jazz.) When the Celtics and Lakers collided in the 1962 NBA finals, they were indisputably the top two teams. Boston had won three of the previous four league championships, but the Lakers were an offensive juggernaut featuring perhaps the greatest 1-2 offensive punch in NBA history: Baylor averaging 38.3 points per game and West 30.8.

To my mind, Baylor is the greatest NBA superstar to never quite get his due. That may be because of his long, undistinguished stint as a team executive with the most-always hapless L.A. Clippers. Still, it seems that whenever the Air Jordan revolution is discussed, it gets traced back to the '70s and Dr. J. But Baylor was flying high long before that. Going into the '62 finals against Boston, Baylor had missed much of the season finishing a military obligation. He figured to be a little rusty, or at least that's what Celtics fans hoped. But the Lakers' offense was clicking on all cylinders—it had averaged 123 points a game in the previous playoff round against Detroit—and against Boston Baylor was unstoppable. With the series tied at two and Game 5 in the Boston Garden, Baylor scored 61 points, still an NBA finals record, to lead the Lakers to victory. But the Celtics won big in L.A., forcing a Game 7 back in the Garden.