Lakers a true Hollywood story

If the Los Angeles Lakers didn't already exist, Hollywood would have had to create them.

Wait a second, Hollywood already did.

Keeping up with the Joneses of the NBA (as in Sam and K.C. and the rest of the Boston Celtics) always has been the Lakers' first order of business. But keeping up with the Nicholsons (as in Jack), the Spielbergs (as in Steven), and the Washingtons (as in Denzel) in the star-obsessed, show biz capital where they entertain the entertainers has been almost as important. Important and integral to their success, sustained across decades at a level to which only the Celtics can relate and in some ways defer.

The trophy tally tightened again Sunday night with the Lakers' 99-86 Game 5 victory at Orlando; it gave them 15 as a franchise to the Celtics' 17. The Lakers won their first championship 60 years ago, some 1,520 miles away in their starter home of Minneapolis and eight years before Red Auerbach, Bill Russell and the rest got busy hoarding rings in Boston. They have won six titles to the Celtics' one over the past 23 postseasons, a period during which Boston missed the playoffs nine times to Los Angeles' two. In terms of trips to the Finals, the Lakers have gone 30 times, the Celtics a distant second at 20.

That might seem like math trickery to create a gap between the teams, one that favors the Lakers (the Celtics, after all, have a 17-3 series record in the championship round to their rivals' 15-15). No such fun-with-numbers is needed, though, to widen the moat between those two NBA heavyweights and everyone else. The Lakers have played 685 playoff games in their history, 147 more than Boston and nearly 70 percent more than third-place Philadelphia (403). Their 413-272 record in postseason games makes them No. 1 in winning percentage, the only team topping .600 (Boston is at .578). The Lakers also are tops in series won or lost, going 100-41 all-time to the Celtics' 71-30.

And they've done it while feeling considerable pressure for much of their history not just to win, but to dazzle. To bring both the style and the substance, when most markets would happily settle for the latter. In a league where the salary cap levels the spending field -- the 2008-09 Lakers ranked eighth in payroll -- and luck is equally elusive for all teams, the current NBA champs and their history have been driven by star power.

As much as it might rankle traditionalists, the NBA long has been about stars, and no other franchise has set the star bar higher than the Lakers. Not the Celtics through all their championships, not the New York Knicks for all their conceit, not the 76ers, the Bulls, the Pistons, the Spurs or any other contender-slash-pretender.

"Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars" was disc jockey Casey Kasem's catchphrase. But it could have been Chick Hearn's, describing the blueprint of Lakers success.

"Even before the Lakers moved westward, the NBA was a players' league, a star-driven operation," venerable assistant coach Tex Winter wrote in the foreword to The Show, sportswriter Roland Lazenby's '06 biography of the franchise. "The individual player in the NBA has always held a value above team play. That's because the early NBA owners found they could survive if they sold fans on the idea of stars."

We're talking early-early, back when the Lakers' nickname made sense and the league's first famous giant -- one of several Hall of Fame big men to have anchored the franchise -- roamed the pre-paint hardwood lanes.