{"id":88786,"date":"2025-06-10T10:35:11","date_gmt":"2025-06-10T10:35:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/88786\/"},"modified":"2025-06-10T10:35:11","modified_gmt":"2025-06-10T10:35:11","slug":"youtube-gold-magic-johnsons-stunning-1980-game-6-performance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/88786\/","title":{"rendered":"YouTube Gold: Magic Johnson\u2019s Stunning 1980 Game 6 Performance"},"content":{"rendered":"

The other day we talked briefly about Magic Johnson\u2019s insanely great 1980 Game 6 performance<\/a> against the Philadelphia 76ers. <\/p>\n

The 6-9 Magic played point guard for most of the season but center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was injured in Game 5 and Los Angeles made the remarkable decision to move their point guard to center. <\/p>\n

As Bill Russell points out in this video, the move made the Lakers much quicker and that Philly had to make adustments to play \u201cthis team,\u201d not the Lakers they knew with Kareem in the post. <\/p>\n

Aside from moving from point guard to center, Johnson spent some time guarding Julius Erving, which was no small task. <\/p>\n

Magic finished with 42 points, 15 rebounds and seven assists, which is arguably the greatest performance in NBA Finals history. <\/p>\n

This about it: he moved as far as you can possibly move position wise, played a nearly flawless offensive game and effectively guarded one of the most legendary players in NBA history. Bill Russell didn\u2019t do that. Larry Bird didn\u2019t do that. Michael Jordan didn\u2019t do that. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s conceivable that LeBron James could have done it, but he never played point guard and…he never did that. <\/p>\n

It was a phenomenal achievement. <\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The other day we talked briefly about Magic Johnson\u2019s insanely great 1980 Game 6 performance against the Philadelphia…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":88787,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3769],"tags":[679,7,666,246,28,142,3264,1187,48,6,2746,678,207,3817,381,42,6750,3263],"class_list":{"0":"post-88786","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-philadelphia-76ers","8":"tag-76ers","9":"tag-basketball","10":"tag-duke","11":"tag-exclude-from-stn-video","12":"tag-front-page","13":"tag-game","14":"tag-gold","15":"tag-johnson","16":"tag-magic","17":"tag-nba","18":"tag-performance","19":"tag-philadelphia","20":"tag-philadelphia-76ers","21":"tag-philadelphia76ers","22":"tag-report","23":"tag-s","24":"tag-stunning","25":"tag-youtube"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/114658628607838432","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88786"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88786\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/88787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}