The 1983-84 season was a turning point for the Los Angeles Lakers and the NBA as a whole. After the Lakers had won two world championships in 1980 and 1982 against the Philadelphia 76ers, they took on the hated Boston Celtics for the 1984 title, and the Showtime era started to get serious.
The 1984 finals is seen as the series that started to make the NBA into what it has been in modern times. The Lakers seemed to have the upper hand over Larry Bird and company, but they blew late leads in Game 2 and Game 4, while the Celtics used roughhouse, playground tactics to take home the Larry O’Brien Trophy in seven games.
Magic Johnson was pinpointed as the culprit due to some miscues he had in crunch time. He went into a deep funk following the championship loss, and he told former NBA player Jalen Rose just how bad his depression was (h/t Lakers Daily).
🗣 @MagicJohnson opens up about losing the 1984 Finals and how he grinded in the offseason to help the @Lakers win the championship the following year.#RenaissanceMan #MagicJohnson #Lakers #NBAFinals pic.twitter.com/gFCUEIFzTb
— Jalen Rose (@JalenRose) September 23, 2023
“This was the first time I made critical mistakes for us to lose that championship,” Johnson said. “So I cried, Jalen, for three months, all summer I cried because I let my teammates down. I was the reason why we lost the championship. But the first thing I had to do, Jalen, was identify and say to myself, ‘I’m not as good as I thought I was.’”
Johnson also dropped some valuable self-help and personal development nuggets. He talked about doing what’s known as a “SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) Analysis” on himself in order to figure out exactly how he had to improve.
The Hall of Fame point guard said he would work out multiple times a day that summer in order to expand his game and get ready for the next season. As fortune would have it, the Lakers returned to the NBA Finals in 1985, and this time, they defeated the Celtics. For good measure, they would do so again in 1987 before becoming the first NBA team to repeat as world champs in 19 years the following season.
Self-help author Napoleon Hill once wrote, “Every adversity, every failure, every heartbreak, carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.” It’s fair to say L.A.’s championship loss in 1984 brought it the seed that would grow into the brilliant flower of soon becoming arguably the greatest team in NBA history.