The Golden Age of Basketball-Chapter 482 - 99 Conclusion

After a season of blending, Gan Guoyang had reached a remarkable level of tacit understanding with his teammates regarding when and how to make solo plays.

He always managed to deliver lethal blows to the opponents with highly efficient one-on-one plays at exactly the right moments and crucial tempos.

Pat Riley once had such a two-point low-post scoring machine at his disposal, but now this machine had aged, and its energy contribution had significantly dwindled.

Meanwhile, Gan Guoyang was entering his peak, and with the addition of this season’s rules, he was unstoppable, continually inflicting substantial damage on opponents.

During the timeout, Riley was at a loss for words. He kept scratching his forehead, drawing a strategy on the clipboard, erasing it, drawing again, then erasing it once more.

Eventually, unable to contain his emotions, he slammed the clipboard onto the ground and, with hands on hips, addressed his players, "You’ve disappointed me, deeply disappointed! I thought we might lose, but never did I imagine we’d lose like this, play in such a dismal way! You’re all a bunch of..."

Just as the profanities were about to spill out, Riley managed to control his emotions and clammed up.

The Memorial Coliseum was exceptionally noisy; the tumultuous cheers of the fans were deafening, while the Lakers’ bench was dead silent.

In the boiling cauldron that was the Glass Palace, it became a frozen expanse, the temperature plunging to minus fifteen degrees. The players’ thought processes, their touch, their emotions, all had been frozen solid.

Riley’s loss of control undoubtedly exacerbated the Lakers’ already terrible state, and although Johnson wanted to rally the team’s morale, it was no longer possible.

Not only had Riley lost control, but Jabbar had as well, and James Worthy’s performance that night was a mess within a mess.

If they had been leading the series with a significant 2:1 advantage, such a defeat could have been tolerated, since it’s natural to experience poor moments during a seven-game series.

The problem was that losing both home games had drastically reduced their margin for error in the series. Now the situation had become critically dangerous, the team’s morale on the verge of collapse.

Once the timeout was over, Riley had hardly any useful arrangements to make, so Johnson gritted his teeth and sustained the Lakers’ offense relying on his personal capabilities.

He first scored from mid-range outside the line, then double-teamed Gan Guoyang. After Gan Guoyang passed the ball out, Porter caught it and missed the shot.

Johnson grabbed the defensive rebound, drove himself down the court, using a swift spin to cut into the paint and made the layup.

Johnson knew he needed to get moving, pick up the pace—if the Lakers were to have any hope at all.

The Trail Blazers’ perimeter shooting was still off the mark, and Johnson took the ball and initiated another fast break, seeing a glimmer of hope to catch up in the score.

However, his lob pass to Jabbar was intercepted by Vandeweghe!

Vandeweghe dashed in unexpectedly, boldly cutting off Johnson’s pass.

Drexler led the counterattack, and Gan Guoyang, like a tank, rolled down the court, caught the ball for a layup, and drew a foul from AC Green.

"Shit!"

Johnson cursed, feeling demoralized by such plays.

Jabbar was swift on fast breaks, but he could no longer keep up in defense.

Gan Guoyang, like an NFL running back, charged unstoppable up the middle to receive the ball, compelling a foul.

Standing at the free-throw line, Gan Guoyang deliberately slowed down his pace, taking his time with each shot, looking to drag out the tempo.

Making both free throws, Gan Guoyang scored 9 points in the fourth quarter, totalling 29 points in the game.

The momentum of the Lakers’ counterattack was suddenly severed. Johnson found orchestrating the offense increasingly difficult.

Jabbar received the ball and went for a solo low-post play, but throughout the entire series, the Trail Blazers had not double-teamed Jabbar even once.

They left Gan Guoyang to defend Jabbar alone, weakening Jabbar’s connection with his teammates significantly.

Once Jabbar had the ball, it was difficult to pass it out and achieve team play.

Moreover, Jabbar’s success rate against Gan Guoyang was not high. Gan Guoyang employed a three-quarter fronting stance combined with physical resistance, which caused Jabbar a lot of trouble.

His turn-around hook shot was disturbed and missed the mark; Gan Guoyang turned around, seized the defensive rebound and blocked out Green, Worthy, and others.

Without the aid of offensive rebounds, the Lakers’ offense became isolated, and their margin for error grew worse and worse.

By mid-fourth quarter, when the substitute Dell Curry hit a corner three-pointer, the difference in score reached a game-high 23 points.

This three-pointer was the final straw that broke the Lakers’ back, sending the entire Memorial Coliseum into a frenzy of cheers—Curry had hit a three-pointer!

Gan Guoyang went up to give Curry a high-five; Curry’s three-pointer was the result of an assist from Gan Guoyang, who had amassed 10 assists.

With little suspense left in the game, in the 1980s when the three-point shot wasn’t widely used, trying to close this kind of gap in half a quarter was practically impossible.

Entering the death countdown, when the trailing coach subs out the starters, it means the game has entered garbage time.

But Pat Riley, his face a shade of iron, stood at the sideline, never calling a timeout to sub out his starters.

Jabbar, frustrated with the repeated back-and-forth running, yelled at Riley after a dead ball, "Have you lost your mind, coach!"

Riley ignored him, refusing to call a timeout; Jabbar, just as he had done in a previous regular season game, called timeout himself to take himself out.

Once Jabbar was out, Gan Guoyang could finally leave the court too. He had been wanting to rest, with a 20-point lead, it was finally a chance to catch a break.

When the buzzer sounded, the score was fixed at 102:124, the Portland Trail Blazers triumphed with a 22-point advantage over the Los Angeles Lakers at home.

With a major 3:1 lead, they were one step away from the finals, taking a solid step towards their title defense.

The Lakers players left the court extremely downcast, and back in the locker room, an emotionally unhinged Pat Riley lashed out at his players.

In his view, with the loss of this game, the Lakers’ entire season’s effort and the best plan of his career all went down the drain.

Although trailing 1:3, there was theoretically still a chance for a turnaround, but it was clear to anyone with eyes that the Lakers were going to struggle to mount an effective counterattack.

Riley yelled and screamed in the locker room, but to his disappointment, no one paid any attention to him. Everyone just coldly watched Riley, showing no reaction at all.

After the second game, Riley’s door-kicking had some effect, but this time around, everyone had already become immune to his pep talks and anger.

The Lakers players saw not a passionate coach thirsting for victory, but a helpless individual who vented his anger on the players when he ran out of tactics.

Since winning the championship in 1985, Riley had become increasingly distant from the players, transforming from a friendly player’s friend to a celebrity coach.

He earned more in endorsements than some of the players’ salaries.

He was Los Angeles’s darling, living in the spotlight of the big city, with the players gradually becoming his backdrop.

It was also since the 1985 season that Riley refused media access to the players’ locker room interviews.

Journalists wanting to chat and talk with the players in the locker room had to go through Riley’s approval.

Though Riley’s intent was to unite the team internally and prevent rumors that could distract the players, such high-handed actions upset quite a few players.

Everyone merely suppressed their dissatisfaction, as long as victories continued on the battlefield, these issues were non-issues.

But the crushing defeat magnified various problems and conflicts, and no one wanted to continue serving the "phony gentleman" with the slicked-back hair and made-up face.

Seeing the players’ indifference, Riley was shocked and angry, feeling that he had lost control of the team.

In his agitation, he punched and shattered the glass on the locker room’s fire cabinet, his hand sliced by the glass, blood staining the cuff of his custom shirt red.

The locker room remained silent, no one spoke, and nobody stepped forward to tend to Riley’s hand—they all thought he was putting on a show.

Only the team doctor came to take Riley to the medical room, while the other players, after changing, left the locker room and the arena to wait on the bus.

They refused to give interviews to the press, only Magic Johnson attended the post-game press conference, sharing some of his thoughts before hurriedly returning to the bus.

The Lakers players waited on the bus for about 20 minutes, Riley’s hand now free of glass shards and bandaged, got on the bus without a word, his face expressionless.

Two days later, in Los Angeles, Riley removed the bandage from his hand, directing the game with his injured fingers, keeping his hand out of sight as much as possible.

He did not want anyone to see the injury on his hand, because he did not want people to know that he too had weaknesses, fatal weaknesses.

The Lakers won a game at the Great Western Forum, 112:119, clinging to a sliver of hope for a comeback.

But Riley appeared calm and indifferent before and after the game, showing none of the passion he once had.

On May 28, 1987, for Game 6 of the Western Conference Finals, the Portland Trail Blazers crisply defeated the Los Angeles Lakers on their home ground, 104:116, with a 12-point margin.

Gan Guoyang scored 44 points with 18 rebounds and 6 blocks for the game, averaging 38.5 points, 16.5 rebounds, 5 assists, and 5.5 blocks per game in the series, sending the League’s number one Los Angeles Lakers home and leading his team into the finals for the second consecutive year.

Also, on May 28, the League announced the regular season MVP results, with Gan Guoyang edging out Magic Johnson to win MVP for his astounding regular-season performance.

"It’s not that Magic Johnson’s performance wasn’t spectacular," stated the Los Angeles Times in their evaluation of Gan Guoyang’s MVP, "it’s that Ah Gan was simply too astonishing."

Gan Guoyang led the Portland Trail Blazers confidently on the path to defending their title, and no one seemed capable of stopping them anymore.

Meanwhile, Pat Riley’s career with the Lakers was hanging by a thread.