Each week of season two, we’ll be looking back on the newest episode of HBO’s “Winning Time” and fact-checking or adding more details on some of the key and bigger plot points with much of the help coming from the book “Showtime: MAGIC, KAREEM, RILEY, AND THE LOS ANGELES LAKERS DYNASTY OF THE 1980S” By Jeff Pearlman.
If everything felt a little too “kumbaya” at the end of the third episode of season two for the Lakers, that’s because it was. While Dr. Buss had set out to address the problems that led to the team losing in the first round of the 1981 NBA playoffs, he hadn’t done much to fix them.