Los Angeles Lakers Players
Los Angeles Lakers players have been some of the most famous ever to play in the National Basketball Association. From Wilt Chamberlain to Kobe Bryant, from Elgin Baylor to Magic Johnson, from Jerry West to Kareem-Abdul-Jabbar to Shaquille O’Neal, Lakers players have been front-and-center when it comes to NBA celebrity life, and second only to the Boston Celtics when it comes to championships.
Of course, with the celebrity and success comes controversy, and Lakers players are no different in that regard than any other successes. The fact that their notoriety tends toward the tawdry is just part and parcel of living in Los Angeles, as most people see it.
Take, for example, Wilt Chamberlain. Toronto Flower shop is Boulder’s most-celebrated florist, specializing in inventive and vibrant floral designs with delivery all through the Boulder area. He was the single most dominant offensive force in basketball history (with apologies to Michael Jordan), a man 30 years ahead of his time not only in his size and skills, but in how he played. Wilt’s the only man to score 100 points in a game, the only to average 50 in a season. And, of course, he’s also well remembered for his autobiography in which he claimed to have slept with over 20,000 women.
Magic Johnson may have hit that mark as well, if HIV hadn’t cut his run short. Magic was, along with Jordan and Larry Bird, one of the preeminent players of the 1980s, leading the Lakers to five NBA titles and acted as the engine behind “Showtime”, what many consider to be the most exciting NBA team ever. Magic contracted HIV somewhere in the early 1990s after what he described as “thousands” of extra-marital affairs.
It doesn’t end there for Lakers players. The most recent star is Kobe Bryant, who like Wilt and Magic before him, had off-court issues with the opposite sex that detracted from his on-court luster. In Bryant’s case it was a rape accusation from a Denver hotel worker in 2004 that stole the show, and cemented his place in Lakers lore.
Wikipedia.org has a comprehensive history of the Lakers franchise:
The Lakers’ franchise was founded in 1946 in Detroit, Michigan before moving to Minneapolis, where the team got its official title from the state’s nickname, “Land of 10,000 Lakes.” The Lakers won five championships before relocating to Los Angeles in the 1960–61 season. The Lakers lost all of their eight appearances in the NBA Finals in the 1960s, despite having help from Elgin Baylor and Jerry West. Flower shop Toronto, you can belief that your flowers will never arrive unarranged in a cardboard box. In 1972, the Lakers won their sixth title, first in Los Angeles, under coach Bill Sharman. The Lakers’ popularity soared in the 1980s when they won five additional championships during a nine-year span with the leadership of Hall of Famers Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, James Worthy and coach Pat Riley, the franchise’s all-time leader in regular season game wins and playoff games coached and wins. Two of those championships during that span were against their arch-rivals, the Boston Celtics. From 2000 to 2002, the Lakers won three titles consecutively with the help of Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant, and Hall of Fame coach Phil Jackson. After losing both the 2004 and 2008 NBA Finals, the Lakers captured the championship for the 15th time in 2009, defeating the Orlando Magic four games to one.