When the Game Was Ours - Larry Bird [62]
"Most of what he said was unprintable," Buckner said. "And he was very pointed in his comments. Most of the guys were looking around the room as if to say, 'He's not talking about me.' But they must have gotten the message, because everyone came back in better shape the next season."
Fitch was fired that summer and K. C. Jones was elevated from assistant to head coach. Bird was not pleased that Fitch was designated to take the fall for a team that quit on him. "As much as I loved playing with some of those guys, they were the ones who should have been shipped out," Bird said. "I told them, 'Someday you'll look back and realize Bill Fitch was the best coach for this team.'"
Bird retreated to his newly constructed home in West Baden, Indiana, complete with its full-length outdoor court. He added a stepback jumper to his arsenal, refining it by shooting 800 of them a day. Buckner came to visit Bird that summer and agreed to participate in his morning workout. They awoke at 7 A.M., put on their track shoes, and ran five miles—uphill. Buckner was amazed by the steep incline of Bird's regular route and was walking by the halfway mark. Bird was not a fast runner, but he had long strides and the determined look of an athlete scorned. He and Buckner did not discuss the Bucks' sweep, but Bird's dissatisfaction was implied in the intensity of his workouts.
After his uphill run, Bird hopped on his bicycle and pedaled 20 miles around the county. Then, with the burning sun at its peak, he spent an additional hour and a half shooting 500 jumpers and 500 free throws.
"I was getting ready for a whole lot of years of us and the Lakers," Bird said. "We were young and they were young. They had Kareem. They had Magic. They were making moves. I wanted to make sure we kept up."
Auerbach felt the same way. Still in search of a physical player to offset the brilliance of Magic, he acquired Dennis Johnson on June 27, 1983, from the Phoenix Suns. The price was Robey, Bird's sidekick and drinking companion. Bird's teammates insisted in subsequent years it was no accident that number 33 won his first MVP trophy after his buddy Robey had moved on.
At the time, the move to bring in D.J. was viewed as somewhat of a gamble. Although his talent was unquestionable, he had developed a reputation as a difficult player. Seattle coach Lenny Wilkens had branded him a "cancer," and the image lingered. Yet D.J. had proven to be a legitimate hindrance to Magic in the Western Conference, able to offset his strength with physical play of his own.
Johnson and Johnson were hardly strangers. They played against one another in Los Angeles during the summer months and occasionally dined together with their wives. That tradition came to a screeching halt once the trade was made and D.J. became a Celtic. The summer after the deal, he ran into Magic just as he was completing his workout.
"In the past it would have been, 'Hey, man, how you been? Where you going to be later? Let's hook up,'" D.J. said. "Not this time. It was, 'Hey, how are you doing? See you later.'"
"Once he started wearing Celtics green, we were done socializing," Magic confirmed.
While the Celtics reinvented their backcourt by acquiring Dennis Johnson, the Lakers had done some maneuvering of their own in preparation for the 1983–84 season. Norm Nixon, a mainstay in the Lakers' rotation for the previous six seasons, was swapped along with Eddie Jordan to San Diego for seven-footer Swen Nater and the rights to rookie Byron Scott.
West wisely recognized that the Lakers needed a lethal perimeter threat to exploit the double teams that Abdul-Jabbar and Magic were drawing. Yet the trade was not well received in the LA locker room. Nixon was popular with his teammates and the players were wary of the rookie Scott, who had starred at Arizona State and grew up rooting for the Lakers, but quickly realized he was going to have to bide his time before he would be accepted as a member of the Lakers' inner circle.