Customer Reviews

Los Angeles Lakers 1985 - Return to Glory [VHS]

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Although today's basketball games have deteriorated into individualistic, poor quality, self-reliant ball hogging, the game was not always that way. In 1985, it was about heart and hustle; pride, passion, and yes, even a little prejudice. Carrying the weight of dozens of Laker teams and the expectations and hopes of decades of other league teams, the Los Angeles Lakers battled history as well as a great Celtic team on the parquet floor of intimidatingly haunted Boston Garden. Through it all they found a path back to glory and established a new era of dominance. After being humiliated the year before by tanking the Finals series against a lesser, but not much, Boston team, the Lakers discovered a new purpose behind their wins that they now shared with the doomed Laker teams of the sixties: redemption. These playoffs were not about winning a championship; they were about beating Boston. It wasn't about attaining fame and stardom but instead about resurrecting their pride and character. Along the way they produced some of the greatest basketball ever played, before or since. Today's teams and specifically their stat-happy, money-grubbing, self-indulged players could take a lesson from.

This great review is really the work of drunkard summerall of Boston, MA:

This Lakers team would've kicked the crap out of any team of any era. Forget anything from the 1990s onward as the league had been watered down by superstar favoritism, expansion and high school players making premature leaps into the NBA. The Lakers were led, of course, by the regal and dominating presence of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Armed with his devastating sky hook, in this series Kareem re-establishes himself as the king...King Jabbar.

This video, although not as good a production as the 1987 and 1988 championship videos, is still an indispensable document of the pinnacle of team basketball and the Lakers 'Return to Glory'.

For those who lived near LA during the Showtime era of the Lakers, roughly 1979-1986, listening to Chick Hearn on KLAC while he simulcasted the TV coverage, this Laker team was more entertaining and professional than today's bums. That's right, I said bums. The NBA, NFL et al are ego-ball today. There was a time when top ability was put together with manners under pressure and team-over-me performance. WHo knows what was going through their minds, but what they put on the courts and on TV was the best 7 years of professional basketball I have seen. And I've seen about 51 years of it. This video, whilst only VHS, has the footage we missed from not setting our VCR timer (remember those) or simply turning the VCR to record the wrong channel... oops! The video is obviously a highlight reel. Nothing substitutes for watching the full-length games that some of us still have on tape, but compare the talent in this video to anything out today, and you will wonder why the NBA has allowed ego to take over the sport. Kareem, Worthy, Magic and Scott were real entertainers, without being visibly egocentric. I don't think Pat Riley would have allowed that.

Although today's basketball games have deteriorated into individualistic, poor quality, self-reliant ball hogging, the game was not always that way. In 1985, it was about heart and hustle; pride, passion, and yes, even a little prejudice. Carrying the weight of dozens of Laker teams and the expectations and hopes of decades of other league teams, the Los Angeles Lakers battled history as well as a great Celtic team on the parquet floor of intimidatingly haunted Boston Garden. Through it all they found a path back to glory and established a new era of dominance. After being humiliated the year before by tanking the Finals series against a lesser, but not much, Boston team, the Lakers discovered a new purpose behind their wins that they now shared with the doomed Laker teams of the sixties: redemption. These playoffs were not about winning a championship; they were about beating Boston. It wasn't about attaining fame and stardom but instead about resurrecting their pride and character. Along the way they produced some of the greatest basketball ever played, before or since. Today's teams and specifically their stat-happy, money-grubbing, self-indulged players could take a lesson from.

THE MATCHES OF JORDAN OF THE BULLS ALL HIS DUCK DURING AN IMPORTANT MATC