‘Winning Time’: When the NBA Went Pop

When asked to describe the 1980s Los Angeles Lakers, the actor DeVaughn Nixon, 38, paused for a moment. “Stylized,” he said. Then he rattled off more words: “Fast. Cool. Fun. Sexy.”

That’s not how most sports franchises are typically described. But the Lakers of that era were built differently.

The Showtime Lakers, as the team was known, set a new template for how professional basketball came to be viewed on and off the floor. The team crossed over into pop culture consciousness in a way no N.B.A. franchise had. It spurred discussions about the place of money, race, celebrity and sex in the game. With their brash new-money owner, Jerry Buss, the Lakers challenged what was then the status quo — which included poor attendance and ratings. They helped save the league.

They also made for great TV, both in their time and as the basis for an equally flashy new HBO docudrama, “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty,” in which Nixon plays his own father, the point guard Norm Nixon. Episode 1 of the 10-part first season debuts Sunday.

Created by Max Borenstein and Jim Hecht, the series is based on the book “Showtime” by the journalist Jeff Pearlman. But the chatty, fast-paced, fourth-wall-breaking style of “Winning Time” is signature Adam McKay (“The Big Short,” “Don’t Look Up”), who executive produced and directed the pilot.

“It was a story that I thought I knew the basics of,” McKay, a lifelong basketball fan who hosted a podcast last year about the N.B.A., said in an email. “I thought it was mostly about Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Dr. Buss.”

“I had no idea until I read that book what a complicated, layered story it was,” he added. “It was like ‘Brothers Karamazov,’ only about basketball.”

“Winning Time” isn’t the first chronicle of the 1980s N.B.A., a seminal period for the sport and the subject of numerous books and documentaries. Based on the eight episodes provided to journalists in advance, “Winning Time” tells the story in a tone befitting those Lakers teams. Cuts are frenetic, needles drop hard, and characters frequently deliver commentary and exposition straight to the camera. Grainy film and glitchy video mix with real and faux archival footage, adding to the vintage vibes.

Much like the Johnson-era Lakers, it’s an unconventional show that doesn’t pretend to be subtle.

The legend

The accomplishments of the Showtime Lakers have become the stuff of lore. The Lakers won five championships from 1980 to 1988, one of the most successful runs of any franchise in N.B.A. history. Their main rivals, the Boston Celtics, led by Larry Bird, won three in that same period. (This N.B.A. writer grew up a Celtics fan and was exposed to the rivalry out of the womb.) Together, those teams produced some of the greatest basketball players the world had ever seen.

DeVaughn said he hadn’t understood the importance of the Showtime Lakers until he was older and on a trip to Positano, Italy, well after his father had retired.

“I come back from the bathroom and Michael Jordan’s sitting down next to us, and he’s just chopping it up with my dad,” Nixon said. Jordan, he recalled, called his father a “bad boy on the court.”

“I was like, ‘Oh, OK, all right, cool.’” Nixon added. “He was a part of something.”

Jordan wasn’t alone in his admiration. Eighties basketball, particularly the Lakers, had a cultural and political poignancy that has influenced the game and the world at large ever since. One could draw a straight line, for example, from the political activism of Abdul-Jabbar, who played for the Lakers from 1975 to 1989, to that of LeBron James. (Something that hasn’t survived: Abdul-Jabbar’s deadly skyhook, which has rarely been seen in this century.)

And today’s fashion parades, sexy dancers and boisterous lineup introductions — with their pyrotechnics, laser light shows and T-shirt guns — owe a lot to Buss (played in the series by John C. Reilly), the transformational owner who purchased the Lakers in 1979.

Buss helped usher in an era that put celebrities courtside and expanded the fan experience. Celebrities had long been connected to Los Angeles sports teams — Doris Day and Jack Nicholson were already frequent sightings at Laker games — but Buss ratcheted up celebrity attendance, a dynamic that still exists.

Solomon Hughes, who plays Abdul-Jabbar, said that “the uniqueness of that professional sports team in the backdrop of Hollywood really just changed how we how we look at sports.”

The Lakers were nicknamed “Showtime” was because of a nightclub called the Horn, which Buss frequented. There, a singer would start a show by saying, “It’s showtime,” and Buss adopted the phrase to describe his approach to the Lakers. A frequent guest of the Playboy Mansion who held a Ph.D in chemistry and sported disco lapels and an impressive comb-over, he was intent on marrying Hollywood glamour with high-quality basketball — a significant break from the standard mold of how N.B.A. teams operated.

The rivalry

That standard was strongly influenced by the Celtics, who dominated the N.B.A. in the two decades before Buss bought the Lakers. Red Auerbach, the former coach and general manager of the Celtics (played by Michael Chiklis), detested, for example, the idea of cheerleaders at games; Boston didn’t have them until 2006. Buss was an interloper, wreaking havoc on the sanctity of basketball.

But Buss wanted more than just a glitzy experience surrounding the game. He wanted the basketball itself to be flashy. That made Johnson’s availability in the 1979 N.B.A. draft all the more serendipitous. Johnson played the game with an eye for fast-paced showmanship, frequently whipping behind-the-back, no-look bullets to teammates as if he had a third eye.

“He wanted to put on a show,” Quincy Isaiah, the 26-year-old who portrays Johnson, said. “But he definitely wanted to make everybody in that arena feel good while watching, including his teammates.”

Not everyone felt good, especially outside Los Angeles. Chiklis, a native of Lowell, Mass., grew up a fan of the Celtics, a franchise with a diametrically opposed view on how basketball was supposed to be.

“I had just about as much hate and ire for them as I did for the Yankees,” Chiklis said, adding, “You couldn’t be in Boston at that time and not get sucked into the vortex of that rivalry.”

The rivalry had a racial component, too. Bird was a transcendent player like Johnson, but some wondered whether he would have received the same attention had he been Black. Dennis Rodman, one of the game’s greatest rebounders, said in 1987 that Bird won three straight Most Valuable Player awards “because he was white,” adding, “Nobody gives Magic Johnson credit.” Isiah Thomas, Rodman’s teammate on the Detroit Pistons, agreed, adding that if Bird “was Black, he’d be just another guy,” setting off a furor.

As the Lakers and Celtics rivalry evolved, interest in the league grew and more games were shown live on TV. (The rise of ESPN, which debuted in 1979, also helped.) Johnson became a household name, especially as the Lakers kept winning.

The celebrity

Before the 1980s, the N.B.A. was a struggling league with low ratings, and the networks wouldn’t give it prime slots. One Finals game in 1977 tipped off at noon Pacific. Many games were aired on tape delay.

The Lakers helped turn the N.B.A. from a fringe sports league into a titan, which set the stage for Jordan and, later, Kobe Bryant to help make the game a global phenomenon. As McKay put it, the Lakers “changed fashion, music, the way people behaved, the way they spoke.”

“It’s an explosion that just rarely happens in any form of culture,” he continued, “let alone sports.”

Along with Bird, Johnson became a star unlike any basketball player before. He and Bird appeared in TV commercials together and clocked huge endorsement deals. When Johnson — a heterosexual athlete who was averaging 12.5 assists and 19.4 points a game — announced in 1991 that he had H.I.V. and was retiring, it sent shock waves around the world. Pau Gasol, a native of Spain, said he had been so inspired by Johnson’s news conference that he vowed as a boy to find a cure for H.I.V. Instead, he became an N.B.A. All-Star, who helped lead the Lakers to multiple championships.

Some of the key figures in the story have said publicly that they aren’t happy with the show, including Johnson. (Neither the central figures portrayed nor the Lakers organization were involved in the production.) In an email, a spokeswoman for Abdul-Jabbar described the series as “based on a fictional account taken from a book” written by “an outsider,” adding that Abdul-Jabbar had not seen the show and that “the story is best told by those who lived it.”

Jeanie Buss, the controlling owner of the Lakers and the daughter of Jerry Buss, who died in 2013, is executive producing a documentary series about the franchise for Hulu, set to debut this year. Johnson is developing one about his own life for Apple. (Spokespeople for Johnson and the Lakers declined to comment.)

“If I was Kareem to Magic or any of those guys, and I looked at it personally, like they’re telling my story, it would probably feel weird to me, too,” Rodney Barnes, an executive producer and writer of the show, said. But the creative team wanted to tell a story about everything that period encompassed, he added — about not only the Lakers but also “America as a whole.”

And their story would hardly be the last take on the Showtime Lakers, Barnes acknowledged.

“There’s still a lot of meat on that bone,” he said.