The first season of HBO’s “Winning Time” – the highly dramatized re-telling of the 1980s Showtime Los Angeles Lakers – ended with the purple and gold celebrating an NBA championship in Magic Johnson’s rookie season. The series has been picked up for a second season and the scene has been set for the show’s future storylines with Pat Riley usurping Paul Westhead and the budding Magic-Larry Bird rivalry.
The show’s initial offering covered just one season of basketball – from the 1979 NBA Draft where the Lakers took Magic No. 1 through the 1980 NBA Finals. There’s a sense that the next group of episodes will pick up the pace, but it will be hard to do anything without talking about the Houston Rockets.