Bill Sharman and the 1971-72 Los Angeles Lakers

Part 6

None of the success surprised Bill Sharman.

He had won 4 NBA titles as a player with the Boston Celtics. He'd won two more titles as a coach, one with the Cleveland Pipers of the ABL and one with the Utah Stars of the ABA. His San Francisco Warriors nearly defeated the vaunted 1967 Philadelphia 76ers during the NBA Finals, before succumbing in 6 games. So finishing the 1971-72 season 69-13, beating teams by an average of 16.3 points per game, including one game where the Lakers won by 63, while glorious and record-setting, wasn't a surprise.

Nor was it the goal.

Sharman had promised Lakers' owner Jack Kent Cooke a championship, something that had eluded the Lakers since they moved from Minneapolis. Eight times the Lakers had played in the NBA Finals over the last 12 years, and eight times they had lost. They had lost when they were underdogs, they had lost when they were favorites, and they had lost to a New York Knicks team whose best player hobbled around on one leg but somehow still managed to dominate a healthy Wilt Chamberlain.

Once Sharman got rid of aging, injured, and selfish Elgin Baylor early in the regular season, everything else fell into place. The Lakers beat the defending NBA champions Milwaukee Bucks four out of five games during the regular season. They swept the Chicago Bulls during the first round of the NBA Playoffs. In the Western Conference Finals the Lakers met up again with the Milwaukee Bucks. Just a year earlier, the two teams had faced-off in the WCFs, with the Bucks winning handily, 4-1. Laker fans were frothing at the mouth for revenge. Two more series and they'd finally taste victory after so many years of disappointment.

The Lakers, however, would experience more disappointment before climbing the mountain.

The Bucks jumped to a big lead in game one, a lead that became even bigger in the second half when Milwaukee outscored the purple 31-8 in quarter number 3. It was total domination from wire-to-wire, as the Bucks cruised to a 93-72 win. The game was played at the Forum in LA, and the fans let the home team know what they thought, booing them for almost the entire second half. Jerry West was crushed. Sharman didn't sleep again for the rest of the series. A Lakers' beat writer vowed not to watch another game, proclaiming he was "tired of covering losers."

The Lakers then managed to fall behind in game 2, and now faced the daunting task of traveling to Milwaukee down 2-0. At halftime, Sharman and Lakers' assistant KC Jones focused entirely on making defensive adjustments for the second half. By the fourth quarter, the adjustments started to bear fruit, and the Lakers grinded out a one-point win, 135-134. Jones continued to make adjustments to his defensive schemes, and the result was three more Laker wins in the next four games, with the Bucks being held to 105 points, 90 points, and 100 points in those contests.

Wilt's exclusive mission, Jones told him, was to play defense. In particular, Chamberlain was expected to frustrate or intimidate big man Kareem Abdul-Jabbar every time the Bucks had the ball. In short, Wilt was asked to play Bill Russell to Jabbar's Chamberlain. The defensive adjustments worked, as the Lakers closed out the WCFs in six games, and kept on working all the way through the NBA Finals, where the Lakers dispatched with the Knicks in five games.

The Lakers had won their first championship since George Mikan roamed the hardwood, and they had two Celtics--Bill Sharman and KC Jones--to thank for it.