Riley and Buss Dish Off Credit to West for Building the Best

With champagne breaking out all around him, Jerry West stayed in the background of the Laker training room, where it was no longer necessary to keep his emotions bottled up. So West uncorked his.

West said there is one big reason why the Lakers and not the Boston Celtics are NBA champions.

All right, then, what is it?

“We had the best team,” he said.

Platitudes and congratulations flowed like, well, champagne in the Laker locker room shortly after the Lakers’ 106-93 victory Sunday in Game 6 of the NBA finals at the Forum. There was a river of good will surging through the room, and West stood at its source.

The Laker general manager said he never had any doubt that his team was going to win. “We had the type of team that could beat the Celtics,” West said. “I just knew we were going to win.”

He knew ? And there was never any doubt?

“No,” West said. “It was our year, from start to finish. Every year the team that wins it has everything going for it. And we had a perfect year. The Celtics did not have a perfect year like they did last year.

“The only way we could ask for anything more is to pick No. 1 in the draft,” he said.

But even West was not so blinded by euphoria that he thinks the Lakers can pry the chance to draft David Robinson away from San Antonio.

“I don’t know, but I doubt it,” West said.

For right now, anything seems possible for the Lakers, who not only won their fourth NBA title in Magic Johnson’s eight years, but also avoided having to play the Celtics in a seventh game. And, of course, the Laker victory also ended the two longest-running stories in this season’s playoffs.

We don’t have to debate whose side Tom Heinsohn is really on or worry about playing lost-and-found with Johnny Most’s earplug.

Instead, the Lakers could pour a lot of champagne on each other, say nice things and generally party hearty for awhile. With a Laker championship T-shirt slung over his shoulder, West watched the team he put together celebrate.

He looked pretty serene, not at all straddling on the edge, which was the stance he seemed to take right up until the Lakers wrapped up their fifth NBA championship since West has been part of the team.

“It’s chaos out there,” West said, motioning to the scene in the locker room, “but it feels awfully good here inside, too.”

Laker Coach Pat Riley said West deserves much more credit than he has received.

“He stood up for James Worthy and resisted trading him and he continued to keep Kareem happy and on this team,” Riley said. “He also brought Mychal Thompson here, which let us know management would do everything possible to help us win the championship.

“Mychal Thompson was the difference,” Riley said. “We wouldn’t have won without him.”

Thompson, who arrived from the Spurs in a trade West arranged in February, gave the Lakers somebody who could defend against Kevin McHale, and those kind of people are in rather short supply.

In 37 minutes of Game 6, Thompson not only held McHale within reason, he also scored 15 points, led the Lakers with nine rebounds and blocked a couple of shots.

What in the world could be better than that?

“The only thing would be lying on the beach in the Bahamas, but I’ll be doing that in a couple of weeks anyway,” Thompson said. “But it really can’t get any better than this. Unless we do it again next year, of course.”

Of course. Even Larry Bird thought that Thompson was the difference for the Lakers. “They made the changes and we didn’t,” Bird said. “They came up with Mychal Thompson, and the Celtics just couldn’t do anything. I really didn’t think the Lakers were going to be able to get a caliber player like a Mychal Thompson.”

But they did. Rather, West did. Yet in a game often ruled by dunk shots and ego-trippers, West said he would rather elbow his way out of the spotlight.

“I don’t want any credit,” he said. “It’s the owner, the coaching staff and the players who deserve all the credit.”

If that’s true, said Laker owner Jerry Buss, then West just made his first mistake of the season.

“He deserves all the credit,” Buss said. “It’s his team. He put it together.

“He’s right when he said we had an absolutely perfect year and I really felt we were going to win it all when he brought in Mychal Thompson. That’s when I began to sense it. Instead of being a bunch of players, we really became a team and I could see how it all fit together.”