When the league’s three biggest stars — LeBron James, Stephen Curry and Kevin
Durant, hoarders of the last five MVP awards — meet in The 2017 NBA Finals,
they will be renewing a legend that never grows old.
“If you did a ranking of who the best players were,” said Jan Volk, who was GM
of the Boston Celtics in the 1980s, “then Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and Kareem
Abdul-Jabbar were in the top three, and order them as you like.”
In 1984, when Magic’s Los Angeles Lakers and Larry’s Celtics launched the NBA’s
defining rivalry by meeting in three NBA Finals over a span of four years, there
were 11 current and future All-Stars dominating their rosters. Three decades
later, the defending-champion Cleveland Cavaliers and the Golden State Warriors,
who won the title at Cleveland’s expense in 2015, are reuniting in The NBA
Finals with similar firepower: They also total 11 All-Stars.
The circumstances are different, of course. Johnson and Bird had been opponents
in the 1979 NCAA championship — the most-watched basketball game in history —
while the Lakers and Celtics had met in seven NBA Finals (1959-69) before their
rivalry was renewed in 1984.
Unlike Boston and L.A., the Cavaliers and Warriors had been stigmatized by years
of failure just before their current runs of success. Even so, the anticipation
for this Finals feels very much the same as for those of the ’80s.
Ever since James collapsed in tears at the end of Game 7 last June in Oakland,
having recovered from a 3-1 deficit to earn Cleveland’s first pro sports title
in 52 years, the NBA’s global audience has been looking forward to a rematch.
Durant’s offseason move via free agency from the Oklahoma City Thunder to Golden
State has only deepened cries for an encore, in sync with the heightened
performances of LeBron throughout this postseason.
There may never be an NBA rivalry of more importance and drama than
Celtics-Lakers. But Cavaliers-Warriors has popped up, just now, as an intriguing
runner-up. Their unprecedented run of three straight NBA Finals has emerged as a
milestone — one that that shows how much the league has changed since the ’80s,
when the NBA was just beginning to recognize its own potential.
All-time talents pave way in 1980s, today
“To compete at that point in time, I felt that you needed three or four All-Star
talents and maybe a couple Hall-of-Famers to compete,” said Volk, who began
assisting Red Auerbach in the front office in 1976. “And for most of those teams
from the early 1980s through to the early ’90s, that holds true.”
Volk, never one for hyperbole, was understating the depth of talent. During each
of the three Boston-L.A. Finals (’84, ’85 and ’87) there were at least seven
future Hall-of-Famers in the starting lineups — Bird, Kevin McHale, Robert
Parish and Dennis Johnson for Boston and Johnson, Abdul-Jabbar and Worthy for
Los Angeles. Three more passed through along the way — Bob McAdoo and Jamaal
Wilkes in ’84 and ’85 for the Lakers, and Bill Walton in ’87 for the Celtics.
The current NBA Finals features three likely Hall-of-Famers — James, Curry and
Durant — based on the fact that every NBA MVP resides in the Hall of Fame. But
the door is open for several teammates to join them.
Depending on their play in this and future NBA Finals, isn’t the Hall of Fame a
reasonable goal for Klay Thompson and Draymond Green of the Warriors, as well as
for Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love of the Cavaliers? Could Deron Williams, once
known as the NBA’s top point guard, earn the ultimate honor with a decisive
performance for Cleveland? Could the same be said of Golden State’s Andre
Iguodala, the MVP of the 2015 Finals?
Like the Lakers and Celtics, the Cavaliers and Warriors were built primarily
through the Draft. James (apart from his mid-career stop in Miami), Irving and
Tristan Thompson were top-four picks by Cleveland. Curry, Thompson and Green
were drafted by the Warriors.
The Celtics augmented their roster with shrewd deal-making at the expense of the
Warriors, who in one regrettable 1980 trade provided Boston with Parish as well
as the Draft pick that became McHale. In that same year, West was completing a
trade with Cleveland that would provide the Lakers with the No. 1 pick in 1982
— to be spent on Worthy.
And so, if not for the Warriors and Cavaliers, there would have been no
Celtics-Lakers rivalry in the 1980s.
Different free agency, different way to build
In those days when players routinely spent three or more years at college —
Johnson, who left Michigan State as a sophomore, was the exception — the
Celtics and Lakers had confidence in the Draft. Not so anymore, insisted West.
“Everyone gets so enamored with all these young kids coming into the Draft
today,” said West, who in recent years has helped build the Warriors as a highly
influential consultant. “I kind of laugh sometimes. They’re not ready to play,
and they’re not ready to help you win. So many people in the lottery fail, it’s
a joke. The teams that need help, they expect to get a star — and a lot of
times they get guys that are gone from the league in a few years. Today there
are No. 1 Draft picks that have failed. Obviously, everyone forgets about it,
but I don’t.”
This era of teenagers entering the NBA has skewed the traditional perceptions of
age. James is only 32, but the minutes he has played in 14 regular seasons are
equivalent to those posted by 36-year-old Abdul-Jabbar. James has already
totaled more postseason minutes than Abdul-Jabbar, who retired at 42.
In addition to drafting more experienced players — Bird was a 23-year-old
rookie – there were fewer limitations to building a roster in the 1980s, when
there were only 23 NBA franchises. “No question that expansion diluted the
talent,” said West.
But prosperity has also played a dismaying role. No one who works in the NBA can
criticize the windfalls of revenue that have overhauled basketball’s economy and
raised salaries exponentially over the last quarter-century. At the same time,
that new money has created layers of financial rules and other complications
that didn’t exist in the simpler 1980s.
“Everyone thinks the game is so much better today,” West said. “The thing that
makes it so different to me is that there is so much more publicity now. In the
1980s we had an All-Star team. We had seven or eight guys that were really good.
When you put some guy in the game off the bench, you’d say to yourself, this
doesn’t bother me. Now when you see teams substitute, you know it’s going to
hurt them.”
The ’85-86 Celtics roster would include six current or future All-Stars, five of
them Hall-of-Famers. In 1985, when L.A. beat Boston in The NBA Finals for the
first time, the Lakers were bringing McAdoo and Wilkes off the bench.
“Today you have so many different variables,” said West. “You may not even be
able to take a player because of his contractual situation.”
Boston and L.A. weren’t in fear of losing Bird or Johnson to free agency. The
salary cap, an invention of NBA commissioner David Stern, was implemented in
1983 after the core of the Celtics and Lakers dynasties had already been
assembled.
“When they first started it, they hoped it would be something that would bring
equality to the league,” said West, with no little irony. “I remember what it
was. It was $3 million.”
That is correct: The salary cap in 1984-85 was $3.6 million per team. The
current $126 payroll of the Cavaliers is 35 times larger than that original
ceiling. James earns more in two months than all of the old Celtics and Lakers
were being paid throughout the season.
Unlike today, fans of the 1980s had no reason to be obsessed with player
salaries. “Now you look at somebody making $5 million and you feel bad for
them,” said Volk. “How did that happen?”
In those first years of the salary cap, only a half-dozen “high-salaried” teams
— including the Celtics and Lakers – were affected by the new financial rules.
“In some ways we benefited from the fact that we were quickly limited by it,”
said Volk. “Because we were forced to learn it and test it out and make it work
earlier than the other teams.
“The rest of the folks didn’t have to learn it for quite some time, and I think
it hurt them from the respect that they didn’t have to learn it. I found it very
difficult to deal with those teams in trade situations. The teams I was talking
to didn’t have the limitations we had, and they didn’t understand my
limitations. They would make proposals that simply couldn’t be done.”
The GMs of smaller-market teams in the 1980s were like so many fans calling into
talk-radio shows with trade proposals that make sense in terms of talent — but
cannot be made because the salaries don’t meet approval with the collective
bargaining agreement.
“There was a predisposition toward caution when dealing with teams like the
Lakers, Celtics, Bulls and Knicks — teams that might have all been over the cap
at that point, or at least were limited by the cap,” Volk said. “The other teams
didn’t understand what we had to deal with as much as they should have.”
Media, players interact in close quarters
For the next two to three weeks, the Cavaliers and Warriors will stay at top
hotels in San Francisco and Cleveland. In the 1980s, when the Celtics made a
habit of visiting glamorous Los Angeles, they stayed for all three NBA Finals at
the LAX Airport Marriott.
“Keep in mind the Marriott at that point in time was very committed to athletic
teams,” Volk said. “They had the 24-hour coffee shop, and they were very
competitive on price.”
“The LAX Marriott for many years was like a destination resort for many of us,”
said Brian McIntyre, who ran public relations and communications for the NBA
from 1981-2010. “It was not your typical NBA hotel. It had a swimming pool. I
never got to the beach, but you were three miles from beach. I remember taking
my family for vacation in LA and we stayed at the Airport Marriott.”
Players and coaches routinely stayed in the same NBA Finals hotel as the media
in the 1980s, in part because superstition dissuaded their franchises from
reserving in advance. “The teams didn’t know when they were going to get into
The Finals until they made it,” said McIntyre. “I’d book extra rooms thinking
the teams might need some.”
The NBA Finals was not the destination event that it has become today. “I
remember when the Philadelphia hotel canceled us in 1982,” said McIntyre. “I was
on my way to the game in San Antonio (where the Lakers were sweeping the Spurs
in the Western finals) and the hotel we booked for the NBA Finals in
Philadelphia said, ‘Sorry, we sold your rooms.’ I said, ‘But we’re using those
rooms!’ They said, ‘Sorry, we had a convention coming in.’ So we had to put
everyone into the Bellevue-Stratford.”
The Bellevue-Stratford Hotel had struggled to fill its rooms since 1976, when it
served as the site of the “Legionnaires’ Disease” outbreak that killed 29
people.
When McIntyre arrived at the NBA, Stern was not yet commissioner and the NBA was
not in charge of running The NBA Finals. (The host franchise took
responsibility, for better and often for worse.) At that time NBA players and
coaches flew on the same airlines as the beat writers who covered them daily for
their local newspapers.
“When everyone traveled commercially and stayed at the same hotels, there were
so many moments to interact and opportunities to build a relationship,” said
McIntyre. “Today those opportunities have evaporated. If you were a player and
you were in the hotel with the media that was covering you regularly, you would
go down to breakfast and see them in the coffee shop. You would come in late at
night and the writers would see you, and when they didn’t write anything about
it, it would build a rapport.”
Hospitality room pranks and fire alarms
By 1984, in line with his goal of raising the league’s profile, McIntyre was
operating a small NBA Finals hospitality room for the media at the LAX Airport
Marriott.
“It was the room that never closed,” McIntyre said. “It was open 24 hours a day.
Some people that didn’t have rooms would crash there. The teams would come down
and share a beer with the media. I remember Kevin McHale and Larry Bird came in
to have a beer — although one year they gave up beer for the playoffs. We saved
a lot of money on beer that year. Just kidding.”
But things got out of hand, naturally, and the alcohol had something to do with
it. One night at The 1984 NBA Finals, at the hospitality room in Boston, someone
came up with the unoriginal idea of repeatedly filling a bucket with water and
propping it upon the half-opened door to the NBA Finals hospitality room. One
after another the writers would arrive for their free beer and be doused.
“Then Pat Riley came down,” said McIntyre.
Riley, the young coach of the Lakers, was on his way in for an after-dinner beer
when he sensed something wrong amid the leering grins of the writers facing him
from the other side of the door. He held back from entering — but his
companion, John Hall of the Orange County Register, did not. Hall walked through
and the bucket not only soaked him but also opened a gash on his nose requiring
several stitches at the local hospital.
“That might have been the last time Riley came into the hospitality room,”
McIntyre said.
Far more upsetting to Riley were the electrical problems that afflicted the
Marriott Copley Place, a newly opened hotel that served as headquarters to the
NBA Finals in Boston. The fire alarms sounded at least 10 times during the
Lakers’ six-night stay.
“As we were leaving to go back to L.A. (for Game 3), we were on a DC-10 on
American Airlines,” said McIntyre. “I had the last seat on the aisle of the
plane, and I had just realized my seat wouldn’t go back. I’m upset because I
really want to sleep on the flight to L.A. when I feel a hand forcefully going
down on my right shoulder. Pat Riley’s face is an inch from mine and he’s
saying, ‘We’re never staying at your hotel again.’ ”
Players continued to visit the hospitality room until The 1988 Finals, when a
series of prank calls were made in Los Angeles. “A bunch of guys got drunk and
called up the Pistons in the middle of the night,” said McIntyre. “[Pistons
coach] Chuck Daly said, ‘We’re not staying in your hotel anymore.’ It was going
to end eventually, but it ended sooner because a bunch of guys sitting around
like sophomores in high school ruined a good thing.”
Memorable cross-country flights
In June 1984, Leigh Montville filed his column for the Boston Globe from Game 6
of the NBA Finals at the Fabulous Forum, where he had watched the Lakers win
Game 6 on a Sunday. Montville left the arena that night to boarded a redeye
flight back East with the Celtics. There was no time to waste. Game 7 was
scheduled for Tuesday.
“They flew overnight to New York, and then they switched planes to Boston,”
Montville said. “That was the flight they could get.”
Montville, as he preferred back then, was seated in the smoking section of the
flight from Los Angeles. “You’re always wondering who you’re going to sit next
to on a flight across the country,” he said.
“I got to my seat and there was a gorgeous woman sitting there. Spectacularly
pretty. Right away I knew she was a model or a movie star or something. So I sat
down, and you always wonder, could I talk to a movie star or a model? Could I
get the words out? She was smoking Pall Malls, I remember. We were talking back
and forth. She hadn’t been in Sports Illustrated yet and nobody really knew her.
She was just very pleasant.”
She said her name was Elle Macpherson. At that time she would have been 20 years
old. A TV reporter from Boston offered him a microwave oven — a relatively new
technology — if Montville would switch seats, but the offer was refused.
“I bet I remember more about traveling with her than she remembers about
traveling with me,” Montville said.
This was the ninth Lakers-Celtics NBA Finals, and traveling between L.A. and
Boston had been — with the occasionally memorable exception — a nightmare
exacerbated by the 2-2-1-1-1 format. Almost 3,000 miles in the air, back and
forth, every other day, while deciding the most important games of the season.
“I remember going back to L.A. in 1969 in Bill Russell’s last season,” Montville
said. “Russell was the coach, and he finally switched the flight from United to
American because he said, ‘I can’t watch those movies again.’ The movie that was
playing each way was Bullitt. Steve McQueen. I bet I saw it 6 times. Russell
changed the flight because he wanted a new movie.”
One change alters landscape
After the 1984 NBA Finals, Stern, the new commissioner, changed the format to
2-3-2. “I remember David asking what I thought — would we get more media to
cover The Finals?” McIntyre said. “I called people up and I found out we would
get a lot more. But the primary reason for the change was to give the players
more time to rest. They were getting to the sixth or seventh game and sometimes
you could see they were wiped out. Why not give them the best conditions? It was
a good thing to cut back on the unnecessary travel.”
Stern has said that he made the change after hearing traveling complaints from
Auerbach. Volk does not remember it that way, however. He was convinced the
format was changed in order to market The Finals to a larger media following.
“They were never concerned about how the Lakers and Celtics felt about it. They
never asked us,” Volk said. “When it was voted upon, I remember talking to Jerry
West about it: We were looking around at the Board of Governors and I said to
him, ‘There aren’t three people other than the Lakers and Celtics who have any
idea how this will change things.’ ”
In the 1987 Finals, the 2-3-2 scheduling essentially forced the Celtics to win
three straight at home in order to upset the Lakers. They lost Game 4 on the
“junior, junior sky hook” by Johnson in the final minute. The Lakers clinched
the series in Game 6 in Los Angeles — a game that would have been played in
Boston under the traditional format.
“I didn’t like it in the first place, even though there was an excessive amount
of traveling,” said West. “Having said that, there is the argument that the
really good teams can win everywhere.”
At the end of Stern’s 30-year term as commissioner, NBA owners voted to change
the format back to 2-2-1-1-1 starting with the 2014 NBA Finals. By then teams
had been chartering their own flights for decades. More charter flights were
arranged to serve the media as well as NBA staff.
“One thing that has changed for sure is the media crowd,” McIntyre. “In ’84 we
couldn’t have had more than 400 media.”
That number has grown five times larger. The horde includes 265 media workers
from outside the U.S. who will be covering The Finals, with 16 international TV
and radio networks live onsite. In 1982, when McIntyre was making his own debut,
he can remember only one foreign journalist – Giorgio Gandolfi from Giganti Del
Basket in Italy.
In short, ‘a magical time’
During their classic 1984 NBA Finals, the Celtics and Lakers totaled 42 attempts
from the 3-point line over seven games. The Cavaliers and Warriors have shot
that many 3s in 13 games this season.
“It was almost a gimmick play,” Volk said. “Larry was very good at it. But look
at the number of attempts he made.”
Bird — the self-declared “3-point king” — totaled 4 of 6 from the arc
throughout the ’84 Finals.
“Coaches have changed the game by using the 3-point line as more of a weapon,”
said West. “It has allowed smaller players to be involved in the league. The
game is not nearly as physical as it was before. It’s a completely different
game today.”
Though the 190-pound Curry may not have thrived in the big-guard era of the
1980s, the fluid pace of his Warriors recalls the fast breaks of Magic’s
Showtime Lakers. Which means that James will have to emulate Bird in this sense
— he must corral Golden State and control the pace if his less-athletic
Cavaliers are going to prevail.
“With San Francisco vs. Cleveland, there’s a little bit of the same
juxtaposition that you had with L.A. vs. Boston,” said Volk of the cultural
differences between the two cities. “You’ve got the high-flyers and the
lunch-pail guys. Though I do not view LeBron as a lunch-pail guy — he’s a very
hard worker who is a high flyer too.”
All of the best Lakers and Celtics in the 1980s could move the ball artfully.
Today the Warriors have an across-the-board edge as a passing team. But the
Cavaliers have their own advantage in LeBron, who is a more athletic
amalgamation of Larry and Magic.
While there has been much complaining of bullying by today’s Finalists — the
Warriors and Cavaliers were a combined 24-1 in their conference brackets — the
end to the NBA postseason tends to justify the means.
The 1980s were dominated ruthlessly by the Lakers, who reached eight NBA Finals,
and the Celtics, who played in five. One of them, at least, appeared in every
Finals, and they won all but two of the championships that decade (Detroit and
Philadelphia won the others). And it is because of their charismatic dominance
that the decade of Magic and Larry is celebrated as the NBA’s golden era.
“It was a joyous time,” said McIntyre. “The days were incredibly long, you
weren’t getting sleep, it was nonstop — but it was fun. There wasn’t a lot of
negativity going on. We hadn’t reached that point where we were so successful
that people say, OK, it’s time to bring them down a notch. Everyone was caught
up in it, and it wasn’t just the people in the league — it was the media who
covered us, the fans, they were all part of something that was growing and
enjoying incredible success and acceptance. It was a magical time.”
Will the mood be renewed? We will know soon enough.
Ian Thomsen has covered the NBA since 2000. You can e-mail him here, find his
archive here or follow him on Twitter.
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