In this its 75th season, the NBA will play on Christmas Day for the 74th time since 1946. Of course, beginning in 1947, it wasn’t a televised quadruple-header of super teams and superstars (COVID fingers crossed) on the league’s secular holiday.
In fact, “it began,” The Sporting News' Dave Kindred wrote of the league’s pioneers, “with men who walked down the middle of an Iowa street, walking through Christmas Day snowdrifts up to their back pockets, walking to get back to their railroad car for the clackety-clack ride from Keokuk to Chicago, where if they were lucky they slept on wooden benches in Union Station’s domed concourse until a train came in to carry them a thousand more bone-rattling miles to New York City.”
All these decades later, when most fans of a certain age think back across all their years of the NBA on Christmas Day, one name comes up quickly: Bernard King.
“BK from BK,” as Spike Lee called him, “was stoppin’ and poppin’, postin’ and toastin’,” the legendary filmmaker and Knicks fan recalls of Christmas Day 1984 when King dropped 60 on the Nets.
What some don’t remember is that the Knicks lost the game, despite King’s breaking Wilt Chamberlain’s Christmas Day record (59 in '61).
As memorable as King's singular individual performance is, it got scant coverage in a weekly publication like The Sporting News, which on its Basketball Bulletin page in the ensuing issue gave one paragraph of coverage that led with the Knicks’ struggles.
“New York’s losing streak reached five games December 29 with a 116-108 loss to Washington,” TSN wrote, “but it wasn’t Bernard King’s fault. King scored at least 36 points in each game, including 60 in a 120-114 loss to the Nets on Christmas Day, the highest total in the NBA since David Thompson scored 73 and George Gervin scored 63 on April 9, 1978.”
By the way, your trivia answer to wow friends and family is six of the league’s eight teams played on Dec. 25, 1947:
Baltimore Bullets 87, Chicago Stags 70
New York Knicks 89, Providence Steamrollers 75
Washington Capitols 73, St. Louis Bombers 56
And while we’re reminiscing, here’s our gift to you: Five memorable stories from Christmases past, as told in the pages of The Sporting News.
1961
Wilt Chamberlain had 36 rebounds, which remains a Christmas Day record, to go with the 59 points, but his Philadelphia Warriors lost to the Knicks, 136-135 in double overtime. The game was part of a December that earned Chamberlain Player of the Month honors, according to The Sporting News.
NEW YORK, N. Y. — Wilt Chamberlain, the record-breaking center of the Philadelphia Warriors, has been selected as the December winner of the Fleer NBA Player of the Month in a poll of National Basketball Association writers and sportscasters.
The elongated star was far ahead in the balloting, registering a decisive majority over Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics.
Chamberlain's play in December was highlighted by the establishment of a new NBA single-game scoring record. He scored 78 points in a triple overtime contest against Los Angeles, December 8. The total erased a 71-point mark set by Elgin Baylor against New York last season.
The NBA Player of the Month award was introduced this season by the Frank H. Fleer Gum Corp. of Philadelphia.
1985
The NBA had offered to pay for Celtics players' families to be at the Dec. 25 game at Madison Square Garden. One player, Kevin McHale, turned down the offer in a very Boston-vs.-New York way: “How would you like to have your wife and kids wake up Christmas morning in a dirty, nasty hotel in a dirty, nasty city?” Just as well. Rookie Patrick Ewing and the Knicks rallied from 25 points down to stun Celtics in double overtime. Boston would go on to win the NBA championship, and Dec. 25 served as a pivotal point in one Celtic star’s season, The Sporting News reported later when naming its NBA Player of the Year.
It was Christmas Day, and it seemed fitting that a player and the team that have been so intertwined should reach the same point together.
What was strange was that, on that day of rejoicing, there were no high hosannas sung in Boston. There was concern for Larry Bird and there was disappointment in the team
It was on Christmas Day of 1985 that the Celtics, having built a 58-33 third-period lead against the New York Knicks in Madison Square Garden, collapsed and lost in double overtime, 113-104. It also was on Christmas Day that Bird's shooting percentage reached its ebb at 44.6 percent after he missed 19 of 27 shots. He had struggled through the playoffs last year, nursing a sore elbow, hand and back and he was bothered by those same maladies in the formative stages of this season. His aching back was particularly bothersome.
"I was in pain all the time,” he said. "It affected everything I did. I couldn’t bend over or extend myself in any way. I was in trouble.”
Bird was having such a tough time that it was generally conceded he had no chance to win his third National Basketball Association Most Valuable Player award in a row.
But after following a regimen devised by orthopedic physical therapist Dan Dyrek, Bird's condition gradually improved. Not surprisingly, so did Boston’s. The Celtics finished 67-15, and Bird wound up shooting 49.6 percent from the floor and 89.6 percent from the free throw line, winning the league title in the latter category, becoming only the third player in NBA history to finish in the top 10 in five offensive categories. Bird averaged 25.8 points, 9.8 rebounds, 2.02 steals and made 42.3 percent of his three-point field-goal tries.
For his efforts, Bird was a landslide selection as The Sporting News 1985-86 Player of the year. Voted on by 197 NBA players, Bird received 160 votes. The Atlanta Hawks’ Dominique Wilkins was runner-up with 12. Wilkins received six of those votes from Celtics players, who were not allowed to vote for teammates.
1994
In 1988, Charles Barkley scored 25 points and pulled down 12 rebounds to lead the 76ers to a 125-110 victory over Washington on Christmas and then came down on the NBA for scheduling games on the holiday: “I think it was very hard for (Washington) to travel on Christmas,” he said in The Sporting News. “They should give us Christmas Day off. Nobody should have to play on Christmas.” Five years later, Barkley, with the Suns, was more pragmatic in TSN.
“December is for Christmas cards, that’s all,” he says. “You win the NBA title in June. Don’t think we’ve gone away. We’re still the conference champions until somebody beats us in the playoffs.”
Barkley says back-to-back victories over the Sonics in Seattle (on Dec. 23) and Rockets in Phoenix (on, yes, Christmas Day) “just prove that the road to the NBA Finals will go through Phoenix.”
1998
Even in the midst of a player lockout that would push the season’s start into February 1999, Christmas and the defending-champion Bulls got their due from a fellow Central Division team, according to the Jan. 4, 1999, issue of TSN.
Give the Hornets’ ad agency some credit. It came up with a clever spot that aired last week, one that depicts Hugo the Hornet pushing a broom around a darkened Charlotte Coliseum with Christmas music playing the background. Then, these words scroll across the bottom of the screen: “Look at the bright side. … It’s December and we’re still tied with Chicago.”
1999
The Lakers hadn’t reached the NBA Finals since 1991 and hadn’t won a championship since 1988, but The Sporting News’ NBA Insider, Dave D’Alessandro, wrote in the first issue after Christmas that he saw something in a Lakers team that not only would win its first title since ’88 but also go on to win three in a row. It’s as if Dave D had an epiphany.
We thought the Lakers still would be consumed by growing pains right now, but there they were on Christmas Day, beating the Spurs at home and boasting the best record in the NBA (23-5) and scaring the bejeebers out of everybody they meet. It was especially impressive because Kobe Bryant really hasn’t come close to reaching full maturity.
Make no mistake, Kobe has bordered on brilliant since his return (from a broken wrist), as reflected by L.A.’s record with him back (11-1 through Saturday). And for anyone who wondered whether he could smoothly blend with Shaquille O’Neal and Glen Rice, that 4-0 sweep through Atlanta, Minnesota, Toronto and Boston was a fair proving ground.
But for all of Shaq’s dominance — and he is the MVP front-runner right now — you’ll want to keep your eye on Kobe. Though we’ve all been wowed by the great hybrids emerging around the league — Vince Carter, Lamar Odom, et al. — we’ve almost forgotten how special Bryant is, and we’ve overlooked his potential to add new dimensions to his game. …
Kobe’s the one to watch. He is the difference between a gifted team that habitually dies in May, and one that can be a team for the ages.
“The better I get at it, the better we get at it, the better we’re going to be in key situations during the contest,” Bryant says. “I’m going to get better at it, no question.”
