Michael Cooper Recalls How Pat Riley’s “Punch” Fired Up the Lakers After the “Memorial Day Massacre”

The “Memorial Day Massacre” of 1985 remains one of the most infamous nights in Lakers history. Never have they lost an NBA Finals game as badly, especially at the hands of their eternal rivals, the Celtics, either before or since.

It was a 148-114 blowout that shocked the NBA community, but it’s an overlooked part of the Lakers’ history, especially since they came back strong to win the series in six eventually, thanks to Pat Riley. But Michael Cooper, a member of that team, decided to revisit the day, and reveal what happened behind the scenes.

The build-up to the match was not comfortable for the Lakers, Cooper recalled in an interview with djvlad. The heat was turned up inside their locker room at TD Garden, on what was a particularly hot day in Boston. Plus, their bus had broken down on the way to the arena. They didn’t really sound like legitimate excuses, but undoubtedly set the stage for the disaster that was set to unfold.

“We get beat so bad that we started to think that the jinx was real,” said Cooper, referring to a common belief from the 1980s that the Lakers would never defeat the Celtics in a Finals game in Boston. Eight times, the Lakers had failed. The Memorial Day Massacre only intensified those thoughts.

“After that game, everybody gets in the bus and we’re thinking, okay, we’re gonna be here, two more, three more days, let’s go get something to eat and we’re cool,” he continued. “We get on the bus, ride to the hotel, we get back to the hotel and Pat Riley goes, ‘I want all you guys to take your stuff up to the room, and come back down to the conference room.’

Riley, a legendary NBA coach-turned executive, was ready to make the Showtime Lakers feel bad about their horrific night out in Boston.

“We go up… come back down, and Pat Riley has one of those green boards with a chalk, and he had a TV set up, and he had all these chairs around the TV. We watched that game twice. Every time we made a mistake, he paused, clicked it back three times…” 

It wasn’t something anyone on that team wanted to see. But Riley forced them to. He was livid, and desperate to fire his boys up. “We will never f******* lose to this team again,” Cooper recalled Riley saying, as he “punched” the wall. And that woke the Showtime Lakers up.

“From then on, we were masters of the game,” Cooper continued. He and the entire Lakers squad had to ignore several jabs over the next few weeks in the aftermath of the massacre, but they were locked in. “We took all that and that was what they called locker room board material, and we put that up there and we came back out with a vengeance.”

“To win that championship that year, we felt we had eradicated all that ghost of all the other eight times the other Lakers championship [failed to win against Boston]… It was like a weight had been lifted off the Lakers organization…” Cooper concluded.