The 1983–84 season for the Los Angeles Lakers saw them lose in the 1984 NBA Finals against Larry Bird's Boston Celtics in seven well-fought games. The Lakers were coming off of an NBA Finals loss the previous season to the Julius Erving and Moses Malone-led Philadelphia 76ers, in which they were swept in four games. The Lakers, powered by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (who broke the NBA's all-time total points record) and Magic Johnson with his 13.1 assists per game (tops in '84), ended up winning 54 games in the 1983–84 NBA season. On April 5, 1984, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had a 12-foot shot over Mark Eaton of the Utah Jazz to surpass Wilt Chamberlain as the NBA's all-time leading scorer with 31,421 points.[1]
In the playoffs, the Lakers defeated the Kansas City Kings in the first round, the Dallas Mavericks in the second, and the Phoenix Suns in the 1984 Western Conference finals in order to advance to what is called the "greatest NBA Finals in history", against Larry Bird's formidable, 62–20 Boston Celtics. The Lakers' easy 137–104 victory in Game 3 of the Finals caused Bird to label teammates "sissies". The words inspired the Celtics, and shot down the Lakers, with the Celtics winning Game 7 by a score of 111–102, a Laker heartbreaker, and still, arguably, the most memorable Finals of the 1980s.