Background
During the championship parade in Los Angeles, Lakers coach Pat Riley guaranteed a repeat championship, something that hasn't been achieved since the Boston Celtics won the 1969 NBA Finals. The Lakers again earned the league's best record in the 1987–88 season, despite winning five games less than the previous year. After sweeping the San Antonio Spurs, they were pushed to the brink in the next two rounds by the Utah Jazz and the Dallas Mavericks, but ultimately prevailed on both contests.
After losing a tough seven-game series against the Celtics in the conference finals, the Pistons believed that this season was their time to rise atop the Eastern Conference echelon. They finished second to the Celtics with a 54-win campaign, then eliminated the Washington Bullets and Chicago Bulls in a pair of five-game series. In a rematch against the Celtics, they managed to steal Game 1 at Boston Garden, the first time they won in the building since 1982, eventually capturing the series in six games.
Read more about this topic: 1988 NBA Finals
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“In the true sense one’s native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)