Los Angeles Lakers Roster
The Los Angeles Lakers are a professional basketball team based in Los Angeles, California that competes in the National Basketball Association (NBA), which was formerly called the Basketball Association of America (BAA). Since 1999, the Lakers have played their home games at Staples Center. 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 NBA season. The Lakers went on to lose all of their eight appearances in the NBA Finals in the 1960s, despite having help from Elgin Baylor and Jerry West. In 1972, the Lakers compiled a 33-game winning streak, the longest streak in U.S. professional team sports, and won their sixth title under coach Bill Sharman. The Lakers' popularity soared in the 1980s when they won five additional championships during a nine-year span with the help of Hall of Famers Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, James Worthy and coach Pat Riley, the franchise's all-time leader in both regular season and playoff games coached and wins. Two of those championships during that span were against their arch-rivals, the Boston Celtics. With the team of Shaquille O'Neal, Kobe Bryant and Hall of Fame coach Phil Jackson, the Lakers played in four of the first five NBA Finals of the 21st century; winning three consecutively from 2000 to 2002, and losing the fourth in 2004. The Lakers would then conclude the decade with three straight Finals appearances; losing to the Boston Celtics in 2008 but then prevailing with back-to-back championships against the Orlando Magic in 2009 and the Boston Celtics in 2010. The 2010 championship marks the 16th NBA championship in Lakers franchise history.
There have been 338 past and current players who has appeared in at least one game for the Lakers franchise.
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Top 0–9 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z |
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| * | Elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame |
| *^ | Elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame; jersey retired by the Lakers |
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Famous quotes containing the words los angeles, los and/or angeles:
“It is hereby earnestly proposed that the USA would be much better off if that big, sprawling, incoherent, shapeless, slobbering civic idiot in the family of American communities, the City of Los Angeles, could be declared incompetent and placed in charge of a guardian like any individual mental defective.”
—Westbrook Pegler (1894–1969)
“The freeway experience ... is the only secular communion Los Angeles has.... Actual participation requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1935)
“Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1935)