Los Angeles Lakers: The significance of winning championship number 17

The Los Angeles Lakers have a lot of legacy on the line during the Orlando bubble.

The Los Angeles Lakers‘ effort to win the NBA title this season has the utmost historical significance to the franchise.

A championship would mark the culmination of a decades-long pursuit to tie (and ultimately attempt to pass) the Boston Celtics for the most in league history.

The Los Angeles Lakers-Boston Celtics rivalry is not just the biggest in the NBA. The competition between them may well be the most intense in all professional sports.

Together, the teams have won 33 of the league’s 73 championships, a whopping 45%. Boston has won 17 titles, LA 16. The Celts have appeared in 21 Finals while the Lakers have made an amazing 31 trips to the final round.

The third-most titles won by any franchise are the six garnered by both the Bulls during the Michael Jordan era of the ’90s (six Finals appearances) and the Warriors (10 trips). What about San Antonio? The Spurs have won five titles in six tries, all since 1999. If you’re adding them up, the total championships of all three of those teams only equal the output of the Celtics.

The LA-Boston rivalry hasn’t always looked quite this competitive. Before the Lakers moved to Los Angeles in 1960, their old Minneapolis predecessors, led by George Mikan, won five titles in a six-year span from 1949-54. At that point, the Celtics hadn’t won any.

But once Bill Russell joined Boston, it had an unprecedented run that will likely never be approached by any team in any professional sport. Between 1957 to 1969, a 13-year period, the Celtics won an incredible 11 titles, including eight straight from 1959-66.

In that 11-title run, the Lakers were strong enough to make the Finals seven times. But as good as Elgin Baylor and Jerry West were, and they were as great a duo that has ever played, the Lakers couldn’t quite match up with Russell or the depth of the Celtics, whose championship squads also featured six other Hall of Famers (Bob Cousy, John Havlicek, Tom Heinsohn, Sam Jones, Frank Ramsey and Bill Sharman).

That was the most frustrating period in Los Angeles Lakers history. You’d think the law of averages would mean LA would win at least one title. But even though the two teams played three seven-game series, the Lakers lost each time. To this day, West claims he hates the color green.

When the 60s finally ended, Russell retired, and the Celtics had won 11 titles to the Lakers five. Although LA finally broke through with West’s only championship as a player in 1972, Boston won two other times in the 70s. That decade ended with the scoreboard reading Celtics 13 titles, Lakers 6. You call that a rivalry?

But the Lakers were far from finished. When Jerry Buss bought the team from Jack Kent Cooke he instilled in the franchise a burning desire to capture more crowns.

The Los Angeles Lakers’ fortunes flipped.

In the Showtime era of the 1980s, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Magic Johnson combined first with Jamaal Wilkes and Norm Nixon and later with James Worthy and Byron Scott to earn five titles. Players on that team universally believe that if it weren’t for some untimely injuries, the Lakers would have even won another crown or two.

The Showtime Lakers finally overcame the ghosts of the 60s and defeated the Celtics two out of three times in the Finals. Even though the Larry Bird-led Boston won three championships in the 80s, by the end of that decade the Celtics lead had been reduced to 16-11.

Neither team won any titles in the 90s. But Buss never wavered in his goal to catch Boston. And while the Celtics floundered, the Lakers laid the groundwork for future success.

In the 1996 offseason, with West as their general manager, the Los Angeles Lakers made two momentous moves. First, they traded for the draft rights to Kobe Bryant, then they signed Shaquille O’Neal as a free agent.

It took a few seasons, and the addition of Phil Jackson as coach, but the Lakers won three straight titles in 2000-02. Some say that team should have won even more. But two years later they closed the door on that era when they traded Shaq to Miami. Still, they had succeeded in narrowing the gap with the Celts to 16-14.

RELATED: Why the Boston Celtics would be a dangerous NBA Finals matchup

A few years later, with Kobe, Pau Gasol and Lamar Odom (the latter two obtained indirectly and directly through the Shaq trade) were ready once again to compete for the NBA crown. As fate would have it, in 2008 they’d again face Boston and its Kevin Garnett-Paul Pierce-Ray Allen nucleus in the Finals. But LA was not up to the task, losing again to their hated rival.

The Lakers, however, were far from finished. They beat Orlando for the title the following year and in 2010 had a re-match in the Finals against the Celtics. The series went seven games but this time LA triumphed. It was their third victory over Boston in the last four times they met in the postseason. And now they trailed by only one title, 17-16.

The Lakers tried desperately in the following few years to win that tying title. The front office at the time was run by Jim Buss and Mitch Kupchak, who were fully aware that Jerry Buss’ health was failing. They did all they could to give him a parting gift.

First, LA traded for Chris Paul, but the deal was negated by Commissioner David Stern. Then Kupchak went all in, trading for Dwight Howard and Steve Nash to form what looked like an all-star starting five. But, at least in part due to injury, the team didn’t quite click, and that 17th championship remained elusive.

In the decade since the Lakers beat the Celtics for the title in 2010, neither team has even made it back to the Finals, much less win any more titles. But in 2020, the Lakers once again have a golden opportunity to make the dream of the franchise come true.

Although none of the best players from the Minneapolis team are still with us, nearly every former LA Lakers star is still closely watching the team. The exceptions are Wilt Chamberlain, who helped the 1972 team win its first title in LA, and of course, Kobe Bryant, who died earlier this year in a helicopter crash.

But guys like Baylor and West, Magic and Kareem, Wilkes and Nixon, Worthy and Scott, Michael Cooper, Kurt Rambis and AC Green, Mychal Thompson and Bob McAdoo, along with Shaq, Gasol and Odom will all be rooting hard for the Lakers if they return to the Finals.

Wouldn’t it be especially fitting and historically appropriate if LeBron James and Anthony Davis lead LA to victory over the Boston Celtics this year for the Los Angeles Lakers 17th NBA championship? It just might happen.