Earlier that night of May 10, 1973, Bill Bradley gave George Kalinski a head-up before Nucks took the floor for Game 5 of the NBA Finals at the Fabulous Forum in Inglewood, California.
“If we win tonight,” Bradley said, “Put your lens on me.”
Certainly, the Knights won that night, and by hand, 102–93, and they wrapped up for their second (and, for whatever reason, less-celebrated) championship in four years. Bradley scored one night exactly – 20 points, seven rebounds, five assists – and as the final second clock melted Klinsky, the Garden’s longtime photographer understood why he was given notice: Bradley leaped into Willis Reid’s arms Granted.
“But only like half a second,” Kalinsky remembered years later. “It’s a good thing I knew it was coming.”
Yield was one of the two or three most iconic pictures in the team’s history: Bradley, smiling ear-to-ear, playing Yogi Berra and Reid, back in the camera, playing Don Larson. Jacques Lucas and Henry Bibby, a group of Knicks looking at the scoreboard from their bench. A solitary Knicks Penitent waves in the midst of an unhappy sea of Lakers fans.
This was without question, the last time the Nucks and Lakers played a basketball game of real mutual importance in Los Angeles.
Forty-eight years and a day later, they would do it again. It will be Tuesday night. Both teams are 38–30. Both teams are fighting and clawing for their respective pieces of playoff pie: The Knicks are still hoping to finish fourth in the East; The Lakers want to avoid being placed seventh in the West – where they now sit – which would mean a date in the play-in tournament.
“Our goal, the big picture, we all know, is to go all the way,” Lakers center Mark Gassol said Monday afternoon.
The Knicks goal is probably a little smaller than that, although none of them would ever say so on record.
So it is that on Tuesday night at the Staples Center the Nucks and Lakers will renew a rivalry that was as colorful and beautiful as any, for a four-year blip on NBA screens. It had stars – Jerry West and Wilt Chamberlain on one side, Bradley, Reed and the rest on the other side. It had New York and LA. In the finals, three Classic Uniforms collided three times in four years. It had everything.
Everything but stability, anyway.
The Lakers’ blood rivals will always be the Celtics. Nux has put together a rotation of these fossils over the past 48 years, the Bulls for a time, then the pesers, then the Heat… and then their own slaps for the better part of 20 years. The Lakers and Nucks have rarely been good since 1973 at the same time.
But here they are both 38–30, both fighting for control of their postmortem destiny. LeBron James remained fully rehearsed on Monday, though Lakers coach Frank Vogel would not ask to be sure if King would grace the game with his presence.
“We did some drill work, some controlled scrimmage and a small full scrimmage and he did it all,” Vogue explained. “One day at a time.”
Yet, even if Lebron sits – or, more likely, if he plays and only 15-20 minutes to go – the Lakers still have Anthony Davis. They still figure in one of their more inspired efforts of the season, 123–110 humbling of a high-flying Suns team coming two nights earlier from the Knicks ’crush. And when Davis indicated that he is excited at the prospect of actually participating in a play-in, which seems to be a lonely Lakers voice. They should win.
So do the nicks. Two of them – or another Celtic loss – will keep them clear about a play-in. But they too need to win to remain in the 4/5 series in which they are now projected, and which they would really like for the home court. And this is exactly the kind of game his coach Tom Thibodo has done.
“Everyone is playing for something,” he preached.
and so it is. And so it would be, in Downtown LA, The Knicks and the Lakers, an ancient rivalry gave new life for 48 minutes after 48 years, all on the table for one night of a throwback, anyway. And maybe to preview something, too, somewhere down the line, a year or two from now.
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