A few in NBA history have ever matched or come close to matching Larry Bird’s trash-talking. And, at the height of the Celtics-Lakers rivalry, it was Bird’s opponents in the Purple and Gold who received the lion’s share of it.
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Michael Cooper, a member of the Showtime Lakers of the 1980s, recently revealed one such situation where Bird made him and his teammates appear foolish. It was a championship game, and Bird was at his usual best, Cooper recalled on VladTV.
And to get into the mind of Cooper, who was guarding him, Bird told the Lakers star how he was “going to wear his a** down”. This was classic Bird: Telling those guarding him what he was going to do. And most of the time, he would go on and do it. So, Cooper prepared himself, only for Bird to flip the switch and proceed to do something completely different.
It caught Cooper and the Lakers off guard. “So, I’m like, what, okay. I’ll get in my best defensive stance,” recounted Cooper.
“He [Bird] comes down on this side, and he comes off, and he comes off Robert Parish, and I’m trailing him, Kareem’s [Abdul-Jabbar] trailing him, and this is the play we had all talked about,” he continued.
“He comes up, he [Parish] throws Larry the ball, he catches it, he goes up in the air, I’m right there, I’m about to push this right down your throat,” Cooper added. “Kareem jumps up, and our hands are out… and I don’t know how this guy got that ball to Parish.”
It was top-tier deception. Everyone on the Lakers, even Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, thought he would shoot and had set up their defensive structure accordingly. Why? Because Bird said he would. The Celtics icon, however, was playing his mind game, and the play ended with Parish dunking the ball.
Bird, after the move, had started laughing. “He looks at me. I told you, motherf******,” Cooper recalled him saying, letting out a laugh as he narrated it.
It’s been decades, so it’s natural to remember this as an eventful incident in their glittering careers and nothing more. But back when it happened, Cooper and his teammates felt deflated. “You just are humiliated by that, because it’s what he says. He’s gonna tell you what he’s gonna do. And he goes out and does it,” he said.
Cooper concluded by revealing that it was the last time Bird trash-talked to him, because the Celtics legend understood that they would plan differently.
