In the 1980\u2019s, NBA fandom was polarized: you either pulled for the Lakers or the Celtics and while most people had a clear preference there, you could pull for one and still admire the other.<\/p>\n
And while Larry Bird made the Celtics mesmerizing, they called the Lakers offense Showtime for a reason. That team was built around Magic Johnson and Kareem-Abdul-Jabbar and it was the greatest running team of all time.<\/p>\n
Advertisement<\/p>\n
In this game against the hapless Sacramento Kings, everything was clicking for L.A. <\/a><\/p>\n Los Angeles went up 28-0 before Derek Smith \u2013 Nolan\u2019s dad \u2013 finally hit a pair of free throws.<\/p>\n The Lakers ultimately won the quarter 40-4, holding the Kings to 0-18 from the floor. The Showtime offense got a lot of credit and it was brilliant and historically great, but you don\u2019t win championships without great defense. Holding an NBA team to four free throws and 0-18 in a quarter is absolutely incredible.<\/p>\n Blue Healer Auctions<\/a> | Drop us a line<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the 1980\u2019s, NBA fandom was polarized: you either pulled for the Lakers or the Celtics and while…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":144721,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,2870,98157,2873,34409,34411,590,5674,44304,85],"class_list":["post-144720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-celtics","tag-derek-smith","tag-lakers","tag-larry-bird","tag-magic-johnson","tag-nba","tag-sacramento-kings","tag-showtime","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144720"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144720\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/144721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}