When the Minneapolis Lakers moved to Southern California and became the Los Angeles Lakers in 1960, the area didn’t really notice. Los Angeles was a football and baseball city back then, and it certainly didn’t help that the Lakers reached the NBA Finals seven times in their first 10 seasons in town, only to lose each time.
As a result, they acquired perhaps the worst reputation in sports and in life: a reputation for being a bridesmaid, but never a bride.
But that all started to change during the 1971-72 season.
The Lakers entered the season still possessing Jerry West, Elgin Baylor and Wilt Chamberlain and the NBA’s first real “superteam.” But all three men were at the tail end of their careers, and in particular, Baylor seemed to have very little left in the tank.
Under new head coach Bill Sharman, the Hall of Fame Boston Celtics guard, the team started 6-3. But it still needed an extra something, and Sharman wanted it to be a feared fast-breaking team. He wanted 23-year-old forward Jim McMillian to replace Baylor in the starting lineup, and with Baylor struggling mightily, the superstar simply decided to retire right then and there.
Surely, with his playing career over, the Lakers’ last hope of winning a world championship also seemed to go out the door.
Everything falls into place
On the night Baylor announced his retirement, the Lakers defeated the Baltimore Bullets, the defending Eastern Conference champs, 110-106 at the Forum. The next night, they traveled north and beat the Golden State Warriors by 16 points, then returned home to get past the New York Knicks by seven points.
A week later, L.A. bludgeoned the Boston Celtics, 128-115, and in seemingly the blink of an eye, this team, which had been dismissed as old and over the hill, had a 10-game winning streak.
That winning streak increased to 12 games — then 15 games — then 20. Suddenly, the Lakers looked like world-beaters, and the question was how much longer the streak would continue.
Their 104-95 win over the Atlanta Hawks on Dec. 12 was their 21st in a row, giving them the longest winning streak in NBA history. The previous record was 20, which had been attained by the Milwaukee Bucks the previous season.
Now, the big fish ahead of the Lakers was achieving the longest winning streak in the history of pro sports, which, at the time, was 26 games by the New York Giants of Major League Baseball.
L.A. got there on Dec. 22 by beating the Bullets again, this time by a final score of 127-120. West led the way with 37 points and nine assists, while fellow Hall of Famer Gail Goodrich had 28 points and McMillian pitched in 25.
The team’s streak would run all the way to 33 games before being stopped by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s Milwaukee Bucks. Over 50 years later, it remains the longest winning streak in professional team sports. The Lakers would go on to finally win the NBA title in five games over the New York Knicks that spring.
What they did that season stands alone in the annals of sports, and it served as the foundation for what the Lakers would do in the 1980s when they scaled even greater heights and became the gold standard of basketball.
