McMillian picked up where Baylor left off

Jim McMillian never saw it coming.

One day Elgin Baylor was a teammate, his Hall of Fame presence easing McMillian’s transition from the Ivy League to the NBA, and the next he was gone, unexpectedly retiring nine games into the 1971-72 season and leaving a hole in the Lakers’ starting lineup that McMillian was expected to fill.

Not that anyone told the second-year pro from Columbia.

“I’m at home in my apartment watching the news and I see them talking about, ‘Elgin Baylor has just announced his retirement,’ ” McMillian said, recalling the events of Nov. 4, 1971. “We had just practiced earlier in the day, and now I’m thinking, ‘Oh, OK.’ And it still didn’t hit me about replacing him because the coach [Bill Sharman] never said anything.

“We had a game the next day and nobody said a thing. Nobody called me. Nobody said, ‘OK, Jim, get ready, you’re going to be starting.’ Nothing. We get there, we get dressed, and in the team meeting finally the coach says, ‘Jim, you’re going to be starting and you’re going to be guarding so-and-so.’

“And I’m thinking to myself, ‘Oh, OK. Thank you.’ ”

However awkwardly it may have transpired, the transition from 37-year-old Baylor to 23-year-old McMillian lighted a fire under the Lakers, who didn’t lose again for more than two months, winning a mind-boggling 33 consecutive games.

The 6-foot-5 McMillian, with his mutton-chop sideburns, the hipster style of the day, stepped confidently into the void, contributing 22 points, 13 rebounds and five assists in his first start. The Lakers, 6-3 before Baylor retired, ended a two-game slide with a 110-106 victory over the Baltimore Bullets at the Forum.

By month’s end, the Lakers were 14-0 in November, the first undefeated month in NBA history. They topped that in December, finishing 16-0.

“An amazing trip,” said McMillian, who is living in retirement in Greensboro, N.C., and will turn 59 in March. “It was a situation where you walked onto the court, you knew you were going to win, and the other team knew it too.”

The longest winning streak in major league U.S. professional sports history finally ended 35 years ago next month, Jan. 9, 1972, when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and the Milwaukee Bucks stopped the Lakers, 120-104, at Milwaukee.

Undaunted, the Lakers ended the season with a 69-13 record, an NBA best until the Chicago Bulls topped it with 72 victories in the 1995-96 season.

McMillian averaged 18.8 points and 6.5 rebounds, making him the Lakers’ third-leading scorer (behind Gail Goodrich and Jerry West) and third-leading rebounder (behind Wilt Chamberlain and Happy Hairston). In May 1972, the Lakers finally reached the goal they had been unable to reach with the magnificent Baylor, ending years of frustration by dispatching the New York Knicks in the NBA Finals to win their first championship since moving from Minneapolis.

A year later, they reached the Finals again but this time lost to the Knicks. Chamberlain then bolted for the San Diego Conquistadors and the Lakers, needing a new center, traded McMillian to the Buffalo Braves for Elmore Smith.

McMillian played only three seasons with the Lakers, but his time in Los Angeles was well spent. It was here he met the Compton woman he would marry -- though Chick Hearn, he says, nearly sabotaged their relationship.

Filling time one night during a lopsided Lakers victory at Phoenix, the late Lakers announcer casually mentioned on the air that McMillian was dating a woman who had just moved to Los Angeles and was studying law at UCLA.

The only problem: That was McMillian’s ex-girlfriend.

Unfortunately for McMillian, his new girlfriend was home listening to the broadcast with her family when Hearn made his faux pas.

“I went over there and it was Alaska cold,” McMillian said.

He can laugh about it now. Once he explained himself, he says, all was well again. He and wife Alexis have been married 32 years. After McMillian left the Lakers, he and Alexis were together through six more NBA seasons and two in Italy.

They settled in Greensboro in 1985 -- McMillian is North Carolinian -- and daughter Emon, 30, and son Aron, 28, played basketball at Wake Forest.

McMillian retired from a career in clothes manufacturing about five years ago, he says, and spends much of his time volunteering at church and at a Christian television station. His hobbies include fly-fishing in the mountains of North Carolina and Virginia, scuba diving off the coasts of North Carolina and Florida and doting on his 20-month-old grandson, Solomon Reynolds, son of his daughter and her husband, Diron Reynolds, an Indianapolis Colts assistant coach.

He’s thankful that Baylor stepped aside when he did.

“Elgin was still able to play,” he said. “Everyone was talking about how he was over the hill, and I’m thinking to myself, ‘I’m having to guard him every day and if he’s over the hill, I would have hated to have guarded him in his prime.’ ”

Baylor may have shared similar feelings about his young challenger. On the day he retired, Baylor said, “I was depriving Jim McMillian of playing time.”

In his absence, McMillian played -- and the Lakers soared.

jerome.crowe@latimes.com