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ELGIN BAYLOR
Elgin Baylor was, literally speaking, the savior of the Lakers. The franchise’s championship tradition had collapsed and there was trouble at the box office before he arrived in Minneapolis for the 1958-59 season. Skipping his senior year at Seattle University, the rookie finished fourth in the league in scoring and led the Lakers from last place to the NBA finals. Owner Bob Short acknowledged later that if Baylor had decided to turn down his $20,000 salary offer, “I would have been out of business.”
Although the Lakers were swept by the Celtics in the 1959 championships, Baylor put Boston on notice early in the following season that future victories would be harder to come by. He scored 64 points in a 136-115 defeat of Boston that snapped the club’s twenty-two game winning streak over Minneapolis and foreshadowed a new rivalry. Baylor’s acrobatic skills, mid-air finesse, running bank shots, hanging jumpers, reverse layups, double fakes, and center-like rebounding skills soon became all too familiar to Celtics fans and others. His performances were a critical ingredient in establishing the Lakers in LA and the NBA on the West Coast.
Baylor did things Michael Jordan never did. Jordan never scored 71 points, for example, but Baylor achieved the distinction in a game against the Knicks at the old Madison Square Garden on December 11, 1960. Jordan never scored 61 points in the NBA finals, but Baylor set that record on April 14, 1962 against the Celtics and it still stands. Only one player in history exceeded Baylor’s scoring average of 38.3 in 1962, and that was Wilt Chamberlain. Baylor was the first player to rank among the top five in four different categories including scoring, rebounding, assists, and free-throw percentage, a feat he accomplished during the 1962-63 season. His lifetime scoring average of 27.4 is fourth all-time.
When Baylor retired in 1971, Bill Sharman, who played against him in Boston and coached him in LA, flatly declared: “I say without reservation that Elgin Baylor is the greatest cornerman who ever played pro-basketball.”