Sport: Court Choreography

• Share

James Naismith, who invented basketball in 1891 by tacking up two old peach baskets in a Springfield, Mass., gym, once said that he preferred lacrosse. Naismith would have changed his mind if he could have seen a game like the one played last week between the New York Knicks and the Los Angeles Lakers.

The first game of the final play-off series for the National Basketball Association championship was basketball at its whirling, swirling, entertaining best. Skill not size, strategy not speed, and marksmanship not muscle were the dominant factors as the poised New York Knicks upset the prestigious Los Angeles Lakers 114-92. Even the Lakers were awed as the sharpshooting Knicks passed and moved through swift, intricate patterns; in the first half, they hit 72% of their field shots. Rasped Los Angeles Coach Bill Sharman, victim of a long siege of laryngitis: "They could be the best-shooting team in basketball."

They could, but no one, not even the Knicks, expect the rest of the best-of-seven series to repeat the action of the first game. The Knicks could hardly play any better; the Lakers clearly can and doubtless will. The Lakers' giant center, Wilt Chamberlain, for instance, may never again be as effectively neutralized. Teammate Jerry West, the alltime N.B.A. play-off scoring leader, cannot do anything but improve his sickly opening-game shooting performance of three baskets in 15 attempts. At the very least, the Knicks1 performance in the first game gave promise that the championship series would be far more exciting a match than anyone had dreamed.

Showdown. For most of the regular season, in fact, fans had looked forward to the final series as little more than an anticlimax. The real drama figured to come in the inevitable showdown between the red-hot Lakers and the defending Champion Milwaukee Bucks for the Western Division title. The winner of that clash, so the smart money said, would then face some hopelessly outclassed team from the Eastern Division.

Part of the scenario came true. The Lakers and the Bucks did meet, but their series rarely generated the anticipated excitement—not even in the seesawing struggle of the seven-footers, Chamberlain and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. In the vital closing minutes of the decisive sixth game, Chamberlain, 35, took almost humiliating command of 24-year-old Jabbar and led the Lakers to victory.

Meanwhile, back in the East, the division final between New York and the Boston Celtics took a surprising turn. The Knicks, who had been the Cinderella team of 1970 (when they won the first N.B.A. championship in their 24-year history), had earlier this season seemed back in the pumpkin class. But after bouncing past the Baltimore Bullets 4-2 in their semifinal, the lightly regarded Knicks proceeded to savage the Celtics 4-1. Suddenly the New Yorkers were at center court, confronting the mighty Lakers.