1971-72 NBA Finals

Result

Games

Finals MVP

Wilt Chamberlain. Chamberlain won Finals MVP with the champion Lakers, anchoring the series with dominant rebounding and interior defense.

Series context

The 1971-72 NBA Finals was a rematch of the previous year's championship series, this time with the Los Angeles Lakers turning the tables on the New York Knicks. The Lakers arrived having authored one of the greatest regular seasons in NBA history, winning a then-record 69 games and famously reeling off a 33-game winning streak, still the longest in major North American professional sports history. That team, coached by Bill Sharman, combined the veteran talents of Jerry West and Wilt Chamberlain with forward Happy Hairston and a supporting cast that bought fully into Sharman's up-tempo, fast-break oriented system, a relatively new offensive approach for the era. Notably, this Lakers championship came after longtime star Elgin Baylor had retired just nine games into the season, a poignant footnote given his years of near-misses in the Finals. The Knicks, seeking to defend their 1970 title, were led by Walt Frazier and Jerry Lucas, who had stepped into a larger role after Willis Reed's knee problems limited his effectiveness. New York's title defense was further complicated by injuries to key contributors Dave DeBusschere and Earl Monroe, which hampered the team's depth throughout the series. The Knicks opened the Finals with a statement win, defeating the Lakers 114-92 in Game 1 in Los Angeles. However, the Lakers regrouped decisively, winning Game 2 by 106-92 and Game 3 by 107-96, before surviving a tight overtime battle in Game 4, 116-111, to take a commanding 3-1 series lead. Los Angeles closed out the championship in Game 5 on May 7 with a 114-100 victory, capturing the franchise's first title since relocating from Minneapolis more than a decade earlier. Wilt Chamberlain, now well into the latter stages of his career, was named Finals MVP for his dominant rebounding and interior defense, anchoring a Lakers defense that overwhelmed New York's smaller frontcourt. The championship was a long-awaited validation for Jerry West and Chamberlain, both of whom had endured painful Finals losses throughout the 1960s, and it capped one of the most statistically dominant regular seasons the league had ever produced, cementing the 1971-72 Lakers as one of the benchmark teams of the era. Los Angeles swept the Chicago Bulls in the first round before beating the defending-champion Milwaukee Bucks, who had gone 63-19 with Abdul-Jabbar and Oscar Robertson, in six games in the Western Conference Finals, a series that pitted Chamberlain against Abdul-Jabbar and West against Robertson at their respective positions. New York, meanwhile, beat the Baltimore Bullets in the first round and then upset a 56-win Boston Celtics team in the Eastern Conference Finals to earn its rematch with Los Angeles. Attendance underscored the scale of interest in the series: crowds of 17,505 packed the Forum for Games 1, 2, and 5, while 19,588 fans attended each of Games 3 and 4 at Madison Square Garden. The Lakers' 69-win regular season stood as the NBA record for more than two decades, until the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls won 72 games, and the 33-game winning streak has never been matched by any team in any of the major North American professional sports leagues.

Sources

• Wikipedia - 1972 NBA Finals
• Basketball-Reference - 1972 NBA Finals