Defend it, defend the last ball, you know? This is the last distance between us and the champion, a semester of hard work, come on boys, come on! Up, up, up! ”

Bellman is making the final mobilization.

It was April 1, 1981, Los Angeles, where the California High School Basketball League Division II finals were played.

The two sides are the champions of Northern California, the Vikings of Palo Alto, and the champions of Southern California, Riverside High School.

The game was already in the final moments, and the Vikings led Riverside High School by one point at 64:63.

With the final 3.5 seconds left, Riverside High had a last-ditch chance.

Li Liang has already scored 35 points in this game.

After a period of training on missions, his skills improved very quickly.

He's already a good center, well-versed in turnaround jumpers, with superior power and a dominant defense.

The Vikings went from an obscure underdog to win the Northern California championship and reach the finals.

They are 3.5 seconds away from the championship and have to defend the last ball.

The timeout ended, the game restarted, and Li Liang returned to the court.

He stared at a very skinny bald head at Riverside High School.

The referee blew the whistle and the game resumed after a timeout.

The bald head ran on the court trying to run out of the open space, he ran out, received the ball, turned around and was about to jump shot!

But a large hand reached over and tapped lightly on the ball.

The ball had already been shot, but it was far off course and fell halfway through.

It was Li Liang, he adjusted his pace, looked at the shooting point, and blocked the opponent's lore ball!

At the end of the game, the score was fixed at 64:63, and the Palo Alto Vikings won the game!

The Viking players on the sidelines flocked to the stadium, and Li Liang raised his hands as he saw a huge banner waving "Ganjia Restaurant" in the stands.

Not far away, a lanky, lonely figure left, wearing the number 5 jersey with the word "Miller" emblazoned on the back.

After the ecstasy and cheers, the surroundings fell into darkness, and Li Liang knew that his journey at Palo Alto High School was coming to an end.

The journey was intermittent, beginning with his first game in high school and continuing through his 2016-2017 NBA regular season season.

Li Liang had a completely different experience in the mission than in real life.

The kind of basketball career that started from scratch and was full of blood and passion.

For a while, when the regular season was particularly tiring, Li Liang even liked to enter the system task to relax himself and feel the fun of basketball again.

And in this process, the regular season of the 2016-2017 season is about to come to an end.

On 4/12/17, the final game day of the regular season, the Kings played their final regular season game.

The opponent against the Clippers was the Clippers, and Li Liang chose to rest all of them in turn.

Prior to this game, the Kings had a 57-24 record.

57 wins, is the first time in Li Liang's career that he has not won 60 wins in the regular season.

However, it has already set the best regular season record for the Kings since the 2003-2004 season.

And in the final game, if they win against the Clippers, the Kings will have 58 wins!

This can be used to commemorate their opponent, Li Liang's former teammate Chris Paul.

But Li Liang still chose to take turns to rest, so that the main players could get enough rest before the playoffs.

For the Kings, a 57-win or 58-win win will no longer affect their Western standings.

The top three in the West have been decided, the Warriors, Spurs and Kings.

The Thunder fell out after the All-Star break because Westbrook suffered an injury and missed most of the games after the All-Star break.

The Thunder, who were fully healthy last year, fell out of the team this year due to injury.

However, they still sit in fifth place in the West with a record of 54 wins.

The Lakers, on the other hand, are ahead of the Thunder with a 55-win record, and the two teams will face off in a big battle in the first round.

In sixth place is none other than the Los Angeles Clippers.

The Clippers have been up and down for both seasons, and it seems that after winning the championship, the team will enter a state of gliding.

Met the king in the first round, and there was more than luck.

So, in the last game of the regular season, the Clippers had a good time with the Kings, beating the Kings by 115-90 and 25 points.

In this way, the Kings ended the regular season with a loss, and their record was fixed at 57-25.

Although this result is the worst regular season record of Li Liang's career, if you look at the NBA historical statistics, you will know that 57-25 is a magical record.

From the 1968 season, when the NBA officially established the 82-game regular season format, excluding the shortened season, to now, among the teams that have entered the Finals, the team with a regular season record of 57 wins and 25 losses is the most, reaching 10 times! (If you count the 2016 Knights in parallel time and space, it reaches 11 times, and if you count the 19 years of the Warriors, it will be 12 times.) ）

Among them, the number of teams that won the championship is 5 (if you count the 2016 Cavaliers, 6), which is half.

In other words, this is a "championship record" that seems to have a magical force.

Li Liang was very satisfied with this result.

For him personally, it was indeed the worst of his career.

But for the entire Kings team, getting this record first has proven that they have the strength to compete for the championship, and a few wins away is not a problem at all.

Anyway, Li Liang has an away advantage.

Moreover, in the second half of the season, Li Liang has been debugging the lineup and experimenting with the style of play, and he has done a more handy job in the position of head coach.

The regular season has become a complete arena for him, and the playoffs are the real battlefield.

After a two-day break, on April 15, the playoffs of the '17 season began.

On the first day, the Warriors played the eighth-ranked Trail Blazers and the Kings played the sixth-ranked Clippers.

Before the game, Cousins, the center of the Kings team, was quite nervous, and he was so nervous that he didn't talk much.

It was Cousins' first career playoff appearance.

As the NBA's No. 1 center this season, Cousins has no playoff experience before, which is enough to see how lonely the NBA's interior line is.

Li Liang rubbed Cousins' shoulder before the game started and said, "Who is the opponent tonight?" ”

"Clippers."

"Yes, Clippers, are you nervous? Think we're going to lose? ”

"I don't know... No, we will definitely win, we will definitely win! ”

"It's not certain that we just lost the game the day before yesterday and nothing is certain."

When Li Liang said this, Cousins was a little confused, why didn't even Bruce Lee say that it wasn't necessarily?

Isn't that the end of the calf?

Li Liang took out his mobile phone and asked Cousins, "Come, predict the score of this game." ”

"What?" Cousins couldn't figure out what Li Liang was talking about.

"I said predict the score of this game, we don't care about the Clippers, predict the king, how many points our king will score."

Cousins fell into a deep groan, knowing that Li Liang likes to make predictions before the game, but never predicts the King.

Could it be that in the playoffs, he is going to start twitting his team's flag?

It's a dangerous idea.

But Li Liang asked very tightly, and said loudly: "Tell me Cousins!" How many points are we going to score in this game! ”

Everyone in the locker room heard it, and they all looked at Cousins, staring at him.

Cousins had to say, and he couldn't say less, saying, "Tonight... Tonight we're going to win, we're going to get 130 points! ”

"OK, 130 points." Saying that, Li Liang tweeted, "I'm going to score 130 points tonight." ”