Battle of the Miracle Workers

The Los Angeles Lakers obviously play on the side of the angels. Their starting center, Darrall Imhoff, is one of the shortest in pro basketball, at 6 ft. 9 in., and boasts a lifetime scoring average of only 6.3 points per game.

Their best guard, Jerry West, is accident prone. Their best forward, Elgin Baylor, is a 33-year-old with two bad knees. Their coach, Bill van Breda Kolff, is a first-year man who learned his trade in the Ivy League. Yet, after losing 22 of their first 44 games this year, they have won 38 out of 47. Two weeks ago, they swept four in a row from the San Francisco Warriors to capture the National Basketball Association's Western Division playoffs. And this week they will be trying to turn a minor miracle into a major one when they take on the Eastern Division's Bos ton Celtics in a best-of -seven series for the N.B.A. championship.

No Western team has won the N.B.A. title since 1958, and the Lakers are almost certain to be underdogs against a Boston team that pulled a miracle of its own last week by spotting the Philadelphia 76ers a three-games-to-one lead, bouncing back to win the Eastern Division Playoffs. Pro basketball is a game of momentum, and the Celtics--tired and aging as they may be--have plenty of that. But then so do the Lakers, plus two of pro basketball's deadliest shooters in Elgin Baylor and Jerry West.

Feeding the Hot Hand. Baylor's career appeared finished after a horrendous accident in 1965 that tore off the top eighth of his left kneecap, followed by surgery for removal of calcium deposits. All last summer, under the direction of Dr. Robert Kerlan, the Los Angeles orthopedic surgeon who won fame for treating Dodger Hurler Sandy Koufax's arthritic pitching arm, he did special calisthenics to strengthen his joints--and snapped back this season to average 26 points a game, win a berth on the N.B.A. All-Star team.

West's performance is no less a tribute to medical science. Despite 1) a broken hand, 2) a broken nose, 3) another broken nose, and 4) a pulled groin muscle he averaged 26.3 points a game during the regular season, then sank a phenomenal 61% of his floor shots in the playoff games against San Francisco

Unlike the Celtics, who rely strongly on the rebounding of Bill Russell and a patterned offense, Los Angeles is a run-and-shoot ball club whose offensive strategy consists simply of feeding the hot hand" of the moment. "Organized confusion,'' is the way Coach van Breda Kolft characterizes the Lakers' style of play. Van Breda Kolff contributes considerably to that himself. A sometime N.B.A. guard (with the New York Knickerbockers) and coach at Princeton during the Bill Bradley era, he is a study in perpetual motion during Lakers' games--stalking the sideline screaming at officials, drop-kicking paper cups fu11 of water into the crowd. Van Breda Kolff's enthusiasm has cost him 24 technical fouls and $850 in fines this season, but it has also proved infectious. "We're all charged up," says Baylor, and West goes even further: "I think we'll win it all."

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