Game 4: It Put the ‘B’ (for Basketball) Back in the NBA

For a while there the last few days, it was uncertain just what the B in NBA stood for.

Was it for Brawling?

Or Badgering?

Perhaps Bickering.

More likely Bush, since Game 3 of the championship playoffs had little more style than tag-team rasslin’ -- and led to all manner of sandbox gamesmanship, initiated by the Celtics.

Coach K.C. Jones and President Red Auerbach did a tap-dance on several hundred minds after the Celtics lost by 25 points Sunday: on reporters, who can write; on league officials, who can read; on the Lakers, who can think.

Reacting to scare stories, league leaders got Jones and Lakers Coach Pat Riley together before Game 4 Wednesday night and told them that what Magic Johnson calls “dirty physicality” would not be tolerated.

This is exactly what cagy K.C. wanted, because the Lakers’ deeper bench allowed them to give more fouls by superior players. In an elbow-swinging war of attrition, L.A. would win.

Even a former celebrated member of the Celtic family called Riley’s aggressive strategy “brilliant.”

Evidently impressed by the warning from Scotty Stirling, NBA vice president for operations, Riley returned to the Laker dressing room and cautioned his players.

Jones yawned, and said nothing to his guys.

The Lakers scarcely lifted an elbow, let alone swung one; Boston controlled the game’s flow, from tipoff to Dennis Johnson’s winning 21-footer at the buzzer.

Whatever the results, whoever benefitted, it was terrific of the league to forcefully reiterate that its B still is for Basketball.

Or Bird.

Very often, they’re synonymous. Larry Bird was the league’s most valuable player the last two seasons; in one few-minute stretch in the fourth quarter Wednesday, he carried his team to victory -- and his sport to a seldom-seen level of enchantment.

Casually, he says: “I figure the fourth quarter is mine.”

Mr. June has a rather hollow ring to it, though Bird frequently is to the NBA finals as Reggie Jackson was to the World Series and Roger Staubach to the two-minute drill.

You want your fate in their hands.

“Seemed like I was in on everything for a little bit in the fourth quarter, didn’t it?” Bird admitted.

Every play.

In every way.

If Bird wasn’t stealing the ball from Magic, he was putting it in the basket from afar. Or wrestling it from Bob McAdoo; or drawing a foul on Kareem Abdul-Jabbar with it; or passing it to DJ for the deciding basket.

“Like the old Bird,” Jones gushed. “Those flying jumpers.”

Bird’s right index finger still is swollen and purple -- ugly. Painful chips evidently are floating about in right elbow. He shot miserably in game three, and a good deal of game four.

Still. ...

“I wanted us to lose the game on my jump shots or win it on ‘em,” he said. “I don’t know what the trouble had been before, cause it wasn’t the injuries. But I’d been tentative.

“I talked to Red and he said I’d even been second-guessing myself on defense. I was very pleased with my defense this game, especially in the fourth quarter.

“I try to get off to a good start (in each fourth quarter), and when I backed off on (James) Worthy and it went down, I knew I was in control.”

His brilliance was contagious.