No, They Can't

Sporting News, The, June 11, 2001 by Dan Graf

If the 76ers don't slow down the Lakers, where does Los Angeles' season stack up against the best ever?

If the Lakers cruise through The Finals, their fans will have something new to argue about during this season's post-championship riot.

Stand back, because "Is Kobe the next M.J.?" is threatening to be replaced by "Are the Lakers the greatest team of all time?" as the unanswerable question of our generation.

A Finals sweep would make the Lakers the only team in NBA history to rumble through the postseason undefeated. One loss would put Los Angeles on par with the 1982-83 76ers, Moses Malone's "Fo'-fo'-fo'" bunch that actually went Fo'-fi'-fo' to finish the playoffs with a 12-1 record and a best-ever .923 playoff winning percentage.

These days, it takes 15 victories to win a title, and even a 15-1 record would leave Lakers with a .938 winning percentage. The point is, barring something unforeseen, there's little debating these Lakers are the best playoff team of all time. But are they the best team ever?

The season-long Kobe-Shaq feud might cost them that billing. The Lakers' 56-26 regular-season record is worse than all of the teams with the top 10 postseason records in NBA history, meaning Los Angeles is likely to be remembered as a team that got hot at the right time, not one that dominated a season from start to finish--the best ever in May and June, but surely not the best ever.

That just means Phil Jackson will have something to motivate Bryant and O'Neal with as they make title runs for the next 10 seasons or so. When the Lakers do finally get it together in the regular season, they'll be measured against these teams--our top five seasons of all time.

1. 1982-83 76ers (65-17 In the regular season; 12-1 in the playoffs). Philadelphia didn't sweep through as Malone predicted--the Bucks ruined perfection with a Game 4 win in the Eastern Conference finals--but the 76ers dominated the playoffs in the middle of a nine-year period in which Larry Bird's Celtics and Magic Johnson's Lakers won every other title. The 76ers had three 20-point scorers in Malone, Julius Erving and Andrew Toney and one of the league's best point guards in Maurice Cheeks.

2. 1995-96 Bulls (72-10, 15-3). Chicago's first title team after Michael Jordan's (first?) return from retirement is to the regular season what this year's Lakers hope to be to the playoffs: the standard all others never will live up to. The Bulls faced the Eastern Conference's previous two Finals representatives--Patrick Ewing's Knicks and Shaquille O'Neal's Magic--on their way to The Finals and ripped them for eight wins in nine games. Only two Finals losses to a loaded Sonics team stands in the way of a No. 1 ranking.

3. 1971-72 Lakers (69-13, 12-3). These Lakers won't show up in many comparisons to this year's version because their .800 playoff winning percentage isn't among the top 10. They make the list for their league-record 33-game winning streak and move near the top of it because the team that beat them twice in the playoffs--the Bucks--is just below them based on its efforts the previous season. Need more evidence of this team's talent? Three Lakers--Gail Goodrich, Jerry West and Jim McMillian--scored more points than Wilt Chamberlain during the regular season.

4. 1970-71 Bucks (66-16, 12-2). Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Oscar Robinson were the inside-outside equivalent of O'Neal and Bryant. Milwaukee won 20 straight regular-season games, which still stands second only to the 1971-72 Lakers' 33. Their .857 playoff winning percentage is the fifth-best ever.

5. 1985-86 Celtics (67-15, 15-3). Two Finals losses against a nondescript Rockets team scarred the Celtics' playoff pedigree. Still, the Boston Garden never was more intimidating: The Celtics were 40-1 there during the regular season and 9-0 during the playoffs. Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Robert Parish and Dennis Johnson hadn't yet started to wrinkle, and Bill Walton came back from the dead to win the Sixth Man of the Year award.

Going quietly

The 76ers enter The Finals as huge underdogs, but even if they go down easily, they won't be compared with the worst NBA finalists of all-time:

1. 1958-59 Minneapolis Lakers (33-39 in the regular season, 6-7 in the playoffs). The Lakers charged into the postseason with a .458 regular-season winning percentage, good enough to grab one of six playoff spots in an eight-team league. Led by Elgin Baylor, they were the first team to get swept in The Finals.

2. 1955-56 Fort Wayne Pistons (37-35, 4-6). A mediocre regular-season mark, .400 playoff winning percentage and the lack of a player you've ever heard of make the Pistons an easy No. 2 choice.

3. 1994-95 Orlando Magic (57-25, 11-10). The Magic, the most recent of the six teams to get swept in The Finals, make the list for getting bounced by the lowest-seeded champion ever, the No. 6 Rockets. In case Shaquille O'Neal forgets, this is the difference between playing with Penny Hardaway and Kobe Bryant.

4. 1980-81 Houston Rockets (40-42, 12-9). Moses Malone helped steal two games from the Celtics in The Finals, but the Rockets are the last team with a losing regular-season record to make it to the last round.