Laker Talent, Celtic Team

By Tom Callahan

Making space in the Boston rafters for a 15th flag

If it seems in the proper order of things that the Boston Celtics are champions and the Los Angeles Lakers runners-up, a feeling yet persists that the Lakers are the better basketball players, while the Celtics' virtues extend beyond the sport's linear boundaries, just out of Magic Johnson's range at 24, no longer within Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's reach at 37.

Jabbar is a beautiful player. Too quick and agile to be so tall and angular, he seemed to have been designed originally as a natural monument to defiance, constructed out of high-tension wires, never to be touched. But his mettle must have softened over 15 seasons, or maybe some of the temper has just gone out of him. While Kareem still shoots and passes with grace and guile, he does not get his share of rebounds any more. On the worst basketball teams, the center is expected to do everything. On the best ones, he is required to rebound. If the Laker center was not surrounded by so many willowy teammates, it would not seem to matter so much, and when they are all tearing up and down the court, it hardly appears to matter at all. This was the situation for most of the first four games of the seven-game series, when overtime victories squeezed out by Boston in Games 2 and 4 offset but scarcely equaled the spectacle of Los Angeles on the dead run.

Momentarily, 6-ft. 9-in. Laker James Worthy seemed about to redefine the forward position with his quickness, just as Magic Johnson, roughly the same size, has revolutionized guard play with his height. But the last few regulation seconds in Game 2 were unpromising for both men. Protecting a two-point lead but not the ball, Worthy tossed the tying basket directly into Celtic Guard Gerald Henderson's grateful path, and dribbling absently Johnson lost track of the time. As would become increasingly clear, the new model is an improvement over Oscar Robertson only in the open court.

After the four games, all of which they should have lost, Boston's players brought out an old Celtic device as smelly as Red Auerbach's cigar and Boston Garden. They locked themselves in their room, damned the league, condemned the media, agreed that the commissioner, the referees and everyone else in the world were against them, and swore to get even with the lot. Topping off his farewell performance as general manager, Auerbach, 66, even rumbled about the abuse his team was taking on CBS, which was slightly preposterous, since TV Color Man Tommy Heinsohn participated in ten Celtic titles as player and coach.

Much was made of Celtic Whooping Crane Kevin McHale's impersonal garroting of horn-rimmed Laker Kurt Rambis in Game 4. But there was a more telling development during that game, when Boston Guards Henderson and Dennis Johnson decided themselves to swap defensive assignments, and the latter efficiently took custody of Magic Johnson. The fact that K.C. Jones was open to the idea describes the Celtics' first-year coach, a humble former backcourtman who minimizes his part in eight Celtic championships by saying, "My fingerprints are all over the coattails of Bill Russell."

In their steamy North Station gym, where eleven of Russell's championship banners drooped beside three others on a 97DEG night, the Celtics ran several Lakers and a referee to near exhaustion to win the fifth game going away and take an improbable lead. Larry Bird, the one with the coattails now, strangely found it cooler to run down the floor than to sit and be fanned by preposterous Cornerman M.L. Carr's flapping towels. Bird scored 34 points and gathered 17 rebounds.

Though they man different posts, direct comparisons between Magic and Bird have been unavoidable since Michigan State and Johnson beat Indiana State and Bird in the National Collegiate Athletic Association finals of 1979. Johnson is more dazzling, but Bird is more amazing.

He can neither run nor jump with the best athletes in the game, but he senses where to run and when to jump before any of the rest. In no other way does he seem sophisticated, but his basketball instincts are what lift the Boston team above its talent.

When Bird seemed left out of the offense in Game 6 at Los Angeles, the Lakers pulled even with one game to go in the longest season.

Often when the most is promised, the least is delivered, but New England was satisfied last week with an unexceptional 111-102 final victory. Bird was named the Most Valuable Player. No city cheers a white star more enthusiastically than Boston. Climbing a mountain the last quarter, Los Angeles approached within three points at 105-102 and had the ball.

But then Magic mishandled it twice. In the back of his mind, Johnson said, he was trying to atone for his transgressions.

Friends Isiah Thomas of Detroit and Mark Aguirre of Dallas stayed up with him afterward and talked through the night.

Celtic Center Robert Parish had 16 rebounds to Jabbar's six in the last game, Boston 52 to the Lakers 33. Forward Cedric Maxwell, with a flair for rising up at great occasions, scored 14 points at the foul line alone. This championship seemed to prompt a broader interest than usual, and the seventh game drew the largest TV audience in pro basketball history. When the live and ravenous crowd broke through and overran the court, Jabbar was stripped of his goggles, though not of his clear view. "It got away from us," he said simply. "I don't think it matters too much now who has the most talent. They had the best team."

--By Tom Callahan