However, I have to go back to the 1971–72 NBA season, when I was the Los Angeles Lakers’ coach, to recall The Game I’ll Never Forget. We won 33 straight games that year, breaking the record for American professional sports. No one could defeat us from the first week of November 1971 to the first week of January 1972, until the Milwaukee Bucks, under the direction of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Oscar Robertson, ultimately put an end to our winning run.
Nevertheless, that season we won 69 games against just 13 losses to set an NBA record, and we entered the playoffs as overwhelming favorites to win the first championship to be awarded to Los Angeles since the team’s relocation from Minneapolis in 1960.
We won four games in a row against Chicago as we easily advanced through the first round. And that advanced us to play our longtime rivals, the Bucks, in the semifinals. After defeating Baltimore in a four-game final sweep to win the 1970–71 championship, Milwaukee was the reigning champion. The Bucks trailed us in victories with sixty-three in the 1971–72 campaign, which was the second-highest in the league.
It was a traditional match. We had Wilt Chamberlain and Jerry West to match their Kareem and Oscar. However, the series appeared more like a mismatch in the first game. We were killed, 93–72. It was awkward. Even so, we knew that if we defeated them in game two, the series would be tied.
But that was a game we had to win. We would most likely be done after two more losses at home, especially considering that Milwaukee will host the next two games.
Our Forum in Inglewood, California was packed to capacity with 17,505 people, making it one of the rare occasions when a game was shown on paid television at the local theaters. If we had tickets available for that game—as well as the other games in the series—we probably could have sold an additional 50,000 or 60,000 seats in the arena.
