Should the Lakers First 5 Titles Count?

Somewhere out on NBA.com, the league is hawking a Los Angeles Lakers warm-up jacket with nine banners displayed on the back. I found this item curious, to say the least. From June 1987 when the Lakers won their tenth championship until June 2002 when the Lakers won their 14 championship, Celtics fans were holding their collective breath as the dreaded purple inched closer to Boston's league-best 16 titles.

Some Celtics fans resorted technicalities in defense of the green. The Lakers, they pointed out, had only won nine titles in Los Angeles, while winning the other five in Minneapolis. I never found these arguments persuasive. But I may be changing my mind.

In the book, The Pivotal Season: How the 1971-72 Lakers Changed the NBA, the author, Charlie Rosen, chronicles the early history of the franchise in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. As you can tell from the sub-title, the book is not only about the Lakers, it is decidedly pro-purple.

Nonetheless, the author manages to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Lakers first five NBA championships.

Rosen notes that the Lakers won five titles in six years (1949, 1950, 1952, 1953, 1954) with George Mikan at the center position, and would have won six in a row had Mikan not been injured in 1951.

There was nothing pretty about how the Lakers played. They rarely ran. They rarely called plays. Instead, they would just walk the ball up the court and wait for Big George to get situated in the low post. Once he got the ball, ninety-percent of the time he'd throw up a hook shot with one hand or the other.

The league tired of watching this plodding, predictable style of play, and responded by widening the lane from six feet to twelve and instituting a rule that penalized camping out in the lane for more than three seconds. Mikan's production immediately fell by 4.6 points per game.

Still the Lakers managed to stay on top for a couple more years.

Then the league implemented the 24-second clock. Since Mikan needed 12-14 seconds to get up the floor and his teammates took 6-8 seconds to get him the ball, the Lakers had only a few seconds left force up a rushed shot.

Mikan's production again dropped precipitously, and two years later he was out of the league. The three rules, Rosen concludes, completely neutralized Mikan and effectively "chased him from the league."

The modern era of basketball had begun.

So if today's game doesn't really resemble the game Mikan and the Lakers dominated, the question should at least be asked whether those early championships count in any meaningful sense?

Consider that the original Cincinnati Red Stockings, baseball's first openly all-professional team, won 130 straight games from 1869 to 1870, including going undefeated in one entire season. Yet no one takes this feat seriously.

Why?

It preceded the modern era of professional baseball.

It's not clear to me that the Lakers should be stripped of their first five titles, but it's equally unclear that they should be treated as other titles won by teams during the modern era of professional basketball.