The Fight, the Handshake and the Finals Portland Took Back

Before Game 3 of the 1977 NBA Finals, Maurice Lucas walked across the court to Darryl Dawkins and offered his hand.

It was a small gesture with a large audience. Three days earlier, Lucas and Dawkins had been ejected from a fight in Philadelphia, where the 76ers had taken a 2–0 series lead. The next time they met, the Portland forward approached the Philadelphia center not with another shove but with a handshake. Lucas told a reporter afterward that he had no personal hard feelings and had not planned the gesture.

Original illustration for The Fight, the Handshake and the Finals Portland Took Back

Then he scored 27 points, and the Trail Blazers won 129–107.

In the years since, the fight has often served as the neat explanation for an untidy reversal: the Sixers lost their intimidating edge, Portland found its nerve, and the Blazers won four straight games to claim the championship. There is something compelling in that account. But the handshake, as much as the fight, deserves a place at its center. Lucas could reject what had happened without pretending it had not happened. Portland still had to win a basketball game. Then it had to win three more.

The fight changed the temperature of the Finals. The question is how much it changed the basketball.

Philadelphia had good reason to feel in command when the teams met at the Spectrum on May 26. The Sixers had won Game 1, 107–101. They were well on their way to winning Game 2. With just under five minutes remaining, they led 96–76. Julius Erving and George McGinnis were among the stars on a roster Portland would have to beat four times, and the first two opportunities had gone Philadelphia’s way.

A championship series can make every late-game confrontation seem prophetic in hindsight. This one did not look, in the moment, like the start of a Portland comeback. It came during a game the Blazers were losing badly.

Dawkins and Portland’s Bob Gross became tangled while pursuing a rebound and went to the floor. After a brief pause, Dawkins swung at Gross. The blow struck Dawkins’s teammate Doug Collins instead; Collins needed four stitches. Lucas pushed Dawkins from behind, and the two squared off. Other players and fans came onto the court. Play was delayed for about 10 minutes, and Lucas and Dawkins were ejected.

Philadelphia won anyway, 107–89.

That score matters. The fight did not rescue Game 2 for Portland, and it did not interrupt a close finish the Blazers might otherwise have won. The Sixers left with an 18-point victory and a two-game lead. If the series had continued in the direction established by its opening games, the confrontation might have remained a notorious incident in a Philadelphia championship.

Instead, it became the incident people looked back upon while trying to explain why the direction changed.

The aftermath was hardly a simple picture of one team united and the other divided. Later reporting by The Philadelphia Inquirer described Dawkins’s anger in the locker room and said he tore a toilet from the wall. Dawkins felt his teammates had failed to come to his aid after Lucas pushed him. The fight may have projected Philadelphia’s physical force to anyone watching, but at least one Sixer came away feeling abandoned.

That feeling does not prove the altercation broke the team. Philadelphia had other difficulties, and a Finals loss is too large an outcome to assign to a single quarrel. It does show why the usual shorthand—Portland stood up to the Sixers, and everything changed—leaves something out. The confrontation had different meanings depending on which side of it a player stood.

For Lucas, its public meaning became a concern before the next game. Ken Denlinger, reporting on Game 3 for The Washington Post, wrote that Lucas was bothered by the “gorilla” image attached to the fight. Lucas said he had no personal grudge against Dawkins. The handshake was his own unplanned act, a way to meet his opponent again without extending the brawl.

It also made for a striking reversal. In Philadelphia, Lucas and Dawkins had been sent away from the court. In Portland, they stood together on it before play began. No one could know from that exchange what the game would bring, and it would be a mistake to turn the handshake into a play call or a guarantee. What it offered was a different opening to Game 3 from the ending of Game 2.

Portland supplied the rest through its play.

Lucas’s 27 points led a 129–107 victory at Memorial Coliseum. The Blazers scored 42 points in the fourth quarter, a then-record for a playoff-series quarter. Their crowd helped give the game its force. But coach Jack Ramsay, speaking afterward, did not present the win as the product of a sudden strategic revelation. He said there had been “absolutely no strategic differences.” He pointed instead to defense, running and ball movement, while acknowledging his team’s emotion and the lift of playing at home.

That account is less tidy than a turning-point legend, and more useful. Portland had reached the Finals after sweeping the Los Angeles Lakers in the Western playoffs. Its ability to play together, defend and run had not appeared out of nowhere because Lucas pushed Dawkins. The Blazers had brought those qualities into the series. In Game 3, with their own crowd behind them, they made them count against Philadelphia.

Still, the timing was impossible to separate from the spectacle that preceded it. The Sixers had left Philadelphia ahead 2–0, having won a game that ended in a fight. The Blazers answered at home with a handshake and a 22-point victory. However many causes lay behind the result, the series looked and felt different by the end of that afternoon.

The Blazers made Game 3 more than a one-afternoon correction by winning Game 4, 130–98. The two home games had erased Philadelphia’s series lead, yet they had not won Portland the title. To complete the comeback, the Blazers would have to win on the road, then finish the job at home against an opponent with ample reason to resist.

They won Game 5 in Philadelphia, 110–104. Game 6 was closer still: Portland won 109–107, even as Erving scored 40 points and McGinnis added 28 for the Sixers. There was no four-game procession after the fight. The championship required a road victory and a final game decided by two points.

That finish is a useful answer to the claim that one confrontation settled everything. The fight could become a rallying symbol because Portland kept winning. Had the Blazers lost Game 5 or Game 6, the same images would carry a different weight. A symbol can help people understand a championship; it cannot score the points needed to secure one.

Some who were close to Philadelphia later remembered the fight as a turning point. Former Sixer World B. Free and broadcaster Sonny Hill, in later accounts gathered by The Inquirer, described versions of a lost intimidation factor. Their memories belong to the history of the series. They tell us how the confrontation came to be understood, especially from the side that surrendered a 2–0 lead.

But memory cannot isolate a cause as cleanly as it can preserve an image. Philadelphia’s lead was real. So were Portland’s home-court lift, improved execution and four consecutive wins. The record supports a shift in the series; it does not require us to say a shove caused all that followed.

Perhaps that is why Lucas’s walk across the court remains so revealing. The man at the center of the fight did not repeat it, and he did not need to. He shook Dawkins’s hand, then played one of the games that helped Portland take back the Finals. The act did not settle the series. It marked the distance between an incident that could have defined the Blazers and the response by which they defined themselves.

Philadelphia won the night of the fight. Portland won the championship. Between those facts lie four games of basketball, and a handshake that made clear the fight would not have the last word.