Given how large it is now, people tend to forget just how unimportant the NBA was in the ’70s.
Attendance was sagging, interest was dwindling, and things were bad enough that NBA playoff games — ostensibly the most important games of the season — were being put on tape delay.
That all began to change toward the end of that decade, when Larry Joe Bird was drafted by the Boston Celtics in 1978 and Earvin “Magic” Johnson was drafted by the Los Angeles Lakers in 1979.
The rise of Bird and Johnson helped re-invigorate the NBA (and did so until some guy named Michael Jordan took the league by storm in the ’90s) from the doldrums of the “tape delay era.”
How did Bird and Johnson accomplish this? They had a built-in rivalry dating back to their college days, when Bird’s Indiana teams clashed with Johnson’s Michigan State teams.