How do you build a championship season? First, take a great National Basketball Association team like the Los Angeles Lakers, a team, in the words of David Halberstam that embodies "basketball as it will be played in the next century." Then, ï¬nd a special coach like Pat Riley, a coach uniquely capable of inspiring his men with a driving sense of mission. Finally, stitch it all together with the unbeatable spirit of teamwork. As Pat
Riley himself - the winningest coach in NBA history and the fastest to reach 300
Wins - says: "The essence of life is teamwork. Teamwork rules everything from moonshots to the creation of cities to the renewal of life." This book is Pat Riley's ï¬rst-person account of one particularly poignant season in the evolution of a team, its coach, and the teamwork that made it all happen. For if any pro-basketball club thirsted for the miraculous tonic of teamwork. It was the L.A. Lakers after their epically disastrous 1986 playoff loss to Houston. As the new 1987 season started. skeptics had already dismissed the Lakers as over the hill. Yet, against all odds, '87 proved to be the Lakers' spectacular breakthrough season. With stellar players like Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and James Worthy striving together for a career-best effort, the Lakers powered their way to yet another championship one more incredible time - putting Pat Riley's Show Time style
on full and dazzlingly successful display. Here, at last, for all the world to see, are the inner workings of a team that has won four championships in eight years and now threatens to win the first back-to-back NBA championships in nearly two decades. A team so rich in talent that it outshines the movie stars who pack the courtside seats. A team so reviled that fans of opposing teams inflict shocking acts of violence against them and yet so respected by other rival tans that Lakers' stars are greeted as warmly as the home team.