Lakernoise

Elgin Baylor never won an NBA championship ring.

So how could you even consider him the All-Time MVP of the NBA Playoffs?

Well, you have to at least consider Baylor among the nominees along with Boston’s great Bill Russell (the centerpiece of 11 championship teams), Chicago’s Michael Jordan, and a select few others. By the way, the number of once and former Lakers on this list is strong: Magic Johnson, Kobe Bryant, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Shaquille O’Neal, George Mikan…

Mikan? Hey, the dude powered Minneapolis to six championships back when the lane was shaped like a keyhole (yes, that’s why they still call it the “key,” although the lane was long ago widened and no longer looks remotely like a keyhole).

So you have to nominate Mikan, just as you have to nominate Baylor, who was the motherlode of talent that took extremely weak Lakers teams all the way to the league championship series. To look at Baylor, we’ll consider this brief excerpt from my biography, “Jerry West.” After all, West and Baylor teamed together to make the Lakers one of the most consistently good teams in the history of pro hoops. They just couldn’t beat Bill Russell and the Celtics.

ELEGANT ELGIN

The Minneapolis Lakers had made Baylor the first pick of the ‘58 draft, not long after he had led the little University of Seattle to the NCAA championship game against powerhouse Kentucky, coached by Adolph Rupp. Baylor was called for a run of fouls in that game and his little team lost that title game. It would start a run of frustrations for the Magnificent Elgin.

Baylor, a Washington, D.C., native, sent his uncle to negotiate the contract, a $22,000 deal. As a rookie he had averaged 24.7 points and 15 rebounds for 1958-59. He was second in the league in the most minutes played and led the Lakers in assists, scoring, and rebounding. Midway through that rookie season, he scored 55 in a game, the third highest total in NBA history.

The team clunked along to a 33-39 record, while the roster learned to play with Baylor. By the play-offs, his Lakers teammates had gotten the hang of it, and that’s when Baylor showed his true value.  First, Minneapolis dumped Detroit, then Baylor and company got everybody’s attention by beating defending NBA champion St. Louis for the right to meet Boston and Russell for the 1959 league title.

The Celtics promptly swept the Lakers, but everybody knew there was an amazing new force among them. “Baylor was clearly the most exciting player in the league,” said his coach, former Laker great Jim Pollard.

The Lakers quickly hustled to increase his money to $50,000 a year, a huge figure at the time. Baylor opened that next season by scoring 52 against Detroit. A few nights later, on November 8, 1959, he rang up 64 points against the Celtics, breaking the league’s single-game record set a decade earlier by Jumpin’ Joe Fulks.

With almost no help, Baylor couldn’t lift Minneapolis to the championship series for 1960, but that off-season the club drafted Jerry West and announced that it was moving to Los Angeles for the 1960-61 season.

If people in Los Angeles didn’t know much about pro basketball, Baylor gave them the first big clue that November 15 when he scored 71 points, a new NBA single-game league record, against the Knicks in Madison Square Garden. The news would hit Los Angeles like a lightning bolt, giving sports fans the idea that they needed to get out and see this talented Lakers team.

The veterans around the league, though, weren’t surprised by anything Baylor did. “You couldn’t defend Elgin,” explained Detroit guard Gene Shue. “He had such good outside shot. He could stare you down. He had a quick jab step. He would catch the ball at the top of the key or further out and he’d get you going back and forth. He’d just explode by you. He had a nervous twitch. He was very, very hard to defend. Not only was he a good outside shooter, but he had a good deceptive first step. He had incredible strength and could hang in the air with the ball. When you put all those things together you couldn’t stop him.”

Baylor supposedly had gotten his name at birth when his father glanced at his wristwatch and liked the sound of the name on the face. And later, his college coach, John Castellani would say, “Elgin has more moves than a clock.”

Driving to the basket, he would leave the floor, often not quite sure what he wanted to do, simply relying on his hang time to open his options. Because he was an excellent passer, he could usually find someplace to put the ball for a teammate. Failing that, he could resort to a lay-up, as he seldom chose to dunk.

Even so, Baylor was no gliding featherweight. He was 6-foot-5 and 225 pounds, a powerful rebounder with another special gift for following his own shots and correcting the misses.

“Elgin was very strong,” said John Radcliffe, the Lakers’ longtime scorekeeper. “He would get bumped all the time, but it never seemed to throw him off stride. Even in the air, he would get bumped a lot, but his concentration was so good that the shot would still go where he wanted it to go. He used the glass a lot. I never saw him dunk. It wasn’t the thing to do in those days.”

“Baylor was really the first to have body control in the air,” former Laker and longtime NBA broadcaster Hot Rod Hundley said. “He’d hang there and shoot these little flip shots.”

“He just might be the best player I ever saw,” Chick Hearn offered. “He was doing things that Dr. J. made famous 20 years later, the hang time and so forth. But Elgin didn’t have the TV exposure. Nobody did in those days.”

Added to Baylor’s dynamic mix was the curiosity of his nervous tick, a twitching of his face, leaving defenders confused as Baylor headed around them to the basket. “We used to kid about it,” recalled Johnny “Red” Kerr. “If he gave the nervous tic to the left, he was going left. If he gave it to the right, he was gonna go to his right. But when he shook both ways, that’s when you fell on your ass, and he was gonna go around you.”

“Some players, they struggle when they score,” Gene Shue said. “Elgin, his instincts were so good. He kept you off balance. There wasn’t one forward in the league that wanted to play Elgin. Elgin was one of those players that could embarrass you. He could do 60 on you. And you couldn’t stop him.”

The opportunity to play with a talent like Baylor was one of the major strokes of good fortune in West’s career, something he would genuinely cherish. West came to rely on his multi-talented teammate that first year.

“It was an honor to play with him,” West said later. “I never considered Elgin Baylor as someone I competed against. He is without a doubt one of the truly great players to play this game. I hear people talking about great players today, and I don’t see many that compare to him, I’ll tell you that. He had that wonderful, magical instinct for making plays, for doing things that you just had to watch. I learned from him, from watching him. I was young, wanting to learn. I had an incredible appreciation for other people’s talents. It was incredible to watch Elgin play.”

Baylor’s performances seemed to entrance his less-talented Lakers teammates, especially the forwards, Tommy Hawkins and Rudy LaRusso. Which left little doubt that the Lakers were Baylor’s team, on and off the court.

“Tommy Hawkins was the hardest worker on the team, but he always had trouble getting the ball to go in the hole,” said John Radcliffe, the Lakers’ longtime scorekeeper. “He was a tremendous leaper but he had small hands. He and Rudy LaRusso worked so hard for Elgin. They’d battle and battle, setting picks, getting rebounds, whatever it took.”

Baylor’s mastery extended far beyond the floor with those young teams in Los Angeles, explained Merv Harris, who covered pro basketball for the old LA Herald Examiner: “It was fascinating to see the domination of his personality over that team. Elgin was the boss. He was the most physically dominating player, and his status began with that. Whenever Elgin wanted to play poker, they played poker. Wherever Elgin wanted to eat, they went to eat. Whatever Elgin wanted to talk about, they talked about.”

And in that age before trash talking became an art in the NBA, Elgin pioneered that element of the game, as well. “Elgin knew he was good and he’d let you know,” Gene Shue recalled with a chuckle. “He did it out on the court. He was really an unstoppable player.” “Our nickname for Elgin was Motormouth,” Hot Rod Hundley said. “He never stopped talking. He knew everything, or he thought he did. We had a lot of fun.”

For the Baylor and the Lakers, 1961-62 was one of those golden, fun-loving seasons in which almost everything seemed to go right.

“It was an enjoyable year,” Baylor remembered. “Our camaraderie was great. On and off the court, we did things together. We enjoyed one another. As a team we gave the effort every night.”

Baylor turned in one of the most remarkable performances in NBA history — and he did so while serving his country in the armed forces.

After opening the season on another scoring tare, Baylor was called into reserve duty with the army near Fort Lewis, Washington. As a result, he was able to appear in only 48 regular-season games. He made the lineup mostly on weekends or with an occasional pass, and when he did, he was fresh, ready, and virtually unstoppable. His 38.2 scoring average was second only to that of the prodigious Wilt Chamberlain, who averaged better than 50 points per game that season.

Even with Baylor’s intermittent schedule, the Lakers won the Western Division with a 54-26 record, 11 games better than Cincinnati and Oscar Robertson, and whipped Detroit 4-2 in the division finals series. For the league championship they faced the Celtics, who had ousted Chamberlain and the Warriors in the Eastern playoffs.

The series opened in dank, smelly Boston Garden, where the smoky haze hung over the floor. In that diffused light, the air took on a green hue. It was clearly Bill Russell’s lair, and the Celtics emphasized that in Game 1 with a 122-108 victory. The Lakers’ edge was that their legs were younger, and they used that the next night to deliver a 129-122 upset in Game 2.

A record crowd of 15,180 packed the L.A. Sports Arena for Game 3 on April 10. The Lakers had never seen the place so crazy. All night the noise fed their adrenaline. In the closing seconds, the Lakers were down 115-111 when West scored four points to tie it. Then Boston’s Sam Jones tried to inbound the ball to Bob Cousy with four seconds remaining. Guarding Cousy, West laid back, then surged into the passing lane, stole it, and drove 30 feet for the winning lay-up, 117-115. Boston coach Red Auerbach complained to the refs that it was impossible for West to dribble the distance to score with only four seconds left. The Lakers bench had feared as much. Everyone there shouted for West to pull up and shoot. But he kept digging for the goal and laid the ball in. It fell through the net as the buzzer sounded.

“I had deflected the ball on the run,” West recalled. “I knew I would have enough time. Most things in my life have been instinctive. I played basketball that way. I always knew what the clock was.”

Unfortunately, the Celtics never allowed dreams to linger. They promptly killed any thoughts of prolonged jubilation in LA by taking Game 4, 115-103, and headed back to Boston with the series tied at two. There, it was all Baylor in Game 5. Despite fouling out, he scored 61 points (the record for an NBA Finals game) and had 22 rebounds, while the Celtics’ defensive specialist, Satch Sanders, contemplated another line of work.

“Elgin was just a machine,” Sanders said later.

But his was the kind of performance that elevates Baylor onto the list of nominees. Unfortunately, his Lakers fell short in overtime of Game 7 of that 1962 title battle.

His LA teams also lost Finals series to Boston in  ’63, ‘65, ‘66, ‘68, and ‘69. His Lakers teams also fell in seven games to the New York Knicks in the famous 1970 championship series.

Baylor suffered what was thought to be a career-ending knee injury in the 1965 playoffs, but he defied doctors’ expectations and worked his way back to compete the next season.

Baylor finally retired early in the 1971-72 season, the year the Los Angeles Lakers finally won a championship.

Time has obscured Baylor’s major performances early in his career, especially his superb showing in the 1962 championship series. But he deserves to be considered among the game’s all-time best when it comes to playoff performances.

Roland Lazenby is the author of Jerry West, The Life And Legend Of A Basketball Icon, recently released by ESPN Books.