The Bitter 1969 Defeat

Clearly, I still am suffering from Helsinki.

Because now I turn to that most bitter of bitter defeats the Lakers suffered in the 1969 NBA Finals.

Having lost six straight Finals to the Boston Celtics, Lakers Owner Jack Kent Cooke was committed to doing something big to change his luck. Well, that something’s name was Wilt Chamberlain.

Acquired during the 1968 off-season, Chamberlain gave the Lakers three superstars, The Stilt, Jerry West, and Elgion Baylor. Quickly, everyone anointed the Lakers the new dynasty. True, Bill Russell was still with the Celtics, but his time had past, as had the time for the rest of the green team.

True to form, the Lakers raced off to a fast start, and ended the season with a much better record than Team Green. But all was not well in LA LA Land. The Lakers were coached by Bill van Breda Kolff, a gruff man with nominal people skills. Chamberlain, history tells us, was a man with an enormous ego and a thin skin. The two didn’t hit it off, and ended up feuding the entire season.

The feud carried into the Finals, all the way to game 7. At the beginning of the regular season, Jack Kent Cooke had declared the Celtic Dynasty over. At the beginning of game 7 of the NBA Finals, played at the Forum in Los Angeles, Cooke filled the arena with 5,000 balloons in anticipation of the Lakers first championship since the Mikan Era.

When word of Cooke’s celebration plans reached the Celtics, Team Green, those bastards, asked each other “what will the Lakers do with all those balloons when they lose?”

With five minutes to go in the fourth quarter, Chamberlain felt a cramp in his leg and asked to be taken out. Van Breda Kolff went through the roof. The Lakers had just climbed back into the game after the Cs had built an 18-point halftime lead.

The Lakers actually closed the deficit to three in Chamberlain’s absence, and with two-minutes to go, Chamberlain told the coach that he was able to return to action. Van Breda Kolff wasn’t listening, and told Chamberlain he wasn’t playing another second of the series.

Even without Chamberlain, the Lakers were within an eyelash of pulling ahead when an obscure bench player and Laker castoff, Don Nelson, made a most unlikely shot that would wind up giving the Celtics a two-point triumph.

The Lakers were a stronger team than the Celtics that year. They had a far better regular season record. They won the first two games against the Celtics in the Finals, and were on the threshold of going up 3-1 against Boston when a Celtic guard named Sam Jones threw up a desperate, final-second, off-balance shot that somehow went through the hoop to give his team an incredible 89-88 win that tied up matters at 2-2.

It's doubtful Game 7 ever would have been played had the Lakers' superstar guard, Jerry West, not seriously injured his hamstring in the closing minutes of the Lakers' rousing Game 5 victory in which van Breda Kolff erred by not removing West as soon as the outcome had been decided.

"We just never got the breaks," says Jerry West. "That Sam Jones shot was sheer luck, and Nelson’s shot wasn’t much better."

Damn, that is one bitter dude.