Mychal Thompson Thinks LeBron’s Lakers Need to Win Again Next Year to Be a Historically Great Team

Mychal Thompson was drafted first overall in 1978, but his basketball career took off nearly a decade later, when the San Antonio Spurs traded him to the Los Angeles Lakers. In five seasons, he appeared in four NBA Finals and won two straight championships as a key contributor off the bench.

Thompson has worked as a broadcaster for the Lakers since 2003, and is one of only a handful of people watching these Finals who played for Miami Heat president Pat Riley. On Wednesday, GQ called Thompson to talk about how good LeBron’s Lakers are compared to those original Showtime squads, why Riley’s practices still haunt him, how his son Klay is feeling, and more.

GQ: Are the Finals over?

Mychal Thompson: No you can’t count this Heat team out, man. Usually you’d say it’s over if you had home-court advantage, but in the bubble everything is out the window because Denver’s proven twice that you can come back from a 3-1 deficit. So you can’t take anything for granted and assume anything like that. It’s much different and a much more sterile environment without the great Miami Heat fans and the great Laker fans. So [the closeout game] will be a whole different atmosphere, a whole different attitude, and a whole different scene without the fans in the building.

Having LeBron James and Anthony Davis on your team is nice. The role players filling cracks has surprised me a little bit.

They have a bunch of guys on this roster who’ve been there and done that, as champions. Rondo has done it. JaVale McGee is a champion. Quinn Cook hasn’t played but he knows what it takes to be a champion. J.R. Smith is a champion, played in big time playoff series. Dwight Howard has been there as a player and didn’t win it but he’s put a team on his back and taken them to the Finals. So all these guys know what it takes to win a championship and when you have the two best players in the world and you’re the other 13 players? Believe me, that gives you a nice feeling of comfort and confidence.

Who’s winning Finals MVP?

Probably LeBron. AD has played great and he deserves it as well. You can give them both co-MVP if you want. But LeBron will win it. This will be his, what, fourth one?

It’s hard to say anyone is a better player than LeBron, but you could make a case that Anthony Davis is the best player in the world right now.

Well, LeBron is like Usain Bolt. We all know who the best sprinter in the world is but every now and then he gets beat. And that’s how LeBron is. We know LeBron is the best player in the world, but sometimes Anthony Davis outplays him or beats him to the tape. So if Usain Bolt can get beat every now and then, even LeBron can get outplayed by someone as great as Anthony.

If the Lakers go 16-4, with LeBron and AD playing at such a high level, how do you compare them against some of the other great teams in this franchise’s history?

For me, to be in the Shaq and Kobe, Magic Johnson, Kareem, Worthy realm, or even Kobe, Pau Gasol, and Lamar Odom realm, they’ve gotta do it again. So if they do it again, if they back it up again with another championship, then you can put them in that class. Those teams were all multiple time champions.

You were traded to the Lakers in 1987, a team that’s widely recognized as one of the best in NBA history. What similarities do you see with these Lakers and that group?

There's a lot of similarities because you’ve got two of the best players, of course. We had Magic and Kareem. This team has LeBron, who I consider one of the top four leaders who’s ever played basketball, along with Magic Johnson, Bill Russell, and Michael Jordan. Those are probably the greatest leaders to ever put on a basketball uniform.

This team also plays defense like the Showtime Lakers did. They could lock you down when they wanted to. The way LeBron runs a team, a big point guard, just like Magic. And then you’ve got a great all-around player in Anthony Davis just like we had with Kareem or Worthy. And then you have guys coming off the bench like Caruso and Rondo, bringing that toughness like Michael Cooper did. So yeah, there’s a lot of similarities. There’s a lot of stuff going down.

In May of 1987, during a second-round series against the Warriors, you said “Of course I want to play Boston in the Finals. I think everyone from here to Kilimanjaro would like to see Boston and the Lakers in the Finals.” Do you wish these Lakers had faced the Los Angeles Clippers or the Milwaukee Bucks, the other two teams that were considered serious contenders all year long?

No, not this year. Next year, if we’re in our individual arenas, yeah. But this year, since it’s such a neutral site, it really didn’t matter who the Lakers faced in the Finals as long as the Lakers won. It’s still special now of course, but it means more when you can go to Boston or go to Philly, those great basketball cities, and play in the Finals there.

You played for Pat Riley, who left Los Angeles 30 years ago and has been in Miami for 25 years. Do you have any reaction to going up against your former coach, who all these years later helped construct a team that is now trying to take down the Lakers?

It’s always special to see Riles. We finally got a chance to compete against him in this setting, in this scenario. It makes it extra special because he’s one of the greatest, not only coaches, but sports executives in the history of sports. The way that he can build teams and construct championship teams, he’s one of the greatest sports engineers ever.

What was it like playing for him?

Demanding! He’s a man who doesn’t suffer fools. He expects you to be a pro. He expects you to be an adult. To do your job. Like Bill Belichick simply says: Do your job. And you’re held to account playing for a guy like Pat Riley because he ain’t got time to wait on you. You’ve got to be ready to play.

He’s such a perfectionist and such a winner. I remember when I joined the Lakers, we’d won 10 in a row and then we stubbed our toe and lost our 11th game. I couldn’t believe how mad he was at us for losing that game. I was just coming into a new environment and on another team, anytime you win 10 in a row and then you lose one, you go ‘okay that’s cool.’ But Riles wasn’t accepting that. I couldn’t believe how upset he was that we lost that 11th game. It just showed me how much he wants to win. Every time. Every time out. It doesn’t matter if it’s a November game or a June game.

Would that coaching style work in today’s NBA?

Yes, if you want to win. If you’re a man. Or a woman if you’re in the WNBA. If you don’t want to be coddled it definitely could work. And that’s the kind of players Riles wants to have on his team. Guys who don’t need to be coddled but who are grown men. They don’t do the [9am-5pm] practices anymore, but to be a champion it takes the same type of intestinal fortitude. Eras may change, but to be a champion you still have to be a total pro. And that’s always been the case. If you look at all the championship teams from the last 30 years and look who’s on those teams, they were all grown men. All grown adults. That’s the only way you can win in the NBA. You can’t be a kid out there. You’ve got to be mature.

You’ve got to take care of your body, understand your responsibility to yourself and to your teammates. The way you conduct your personal life and your professional life has to be in an upstanding manner.

Do you have any particularly dreadful memories of a practice with Riley?

All of them. All of them. We worked hard, man. We were in shape but our minds were set for that. We would have our days off, don’t get me wrong, but when it was time to practice it was time to work and our brains were just set for that so we didn’t complain. This was what we were supposed to do, so we went out and did it.

Running, running, running, running, baby. You had to be in shape to play for Riles back in those days. Running, running, running. I think if we set our mind to it we might’ve been able to beat some Kenyan and Ethiopian marathon runners. We were in that good of shape.

Basically Heat Culture.

That’s the way it should be! You’re making tens of millions of dollars, that should be expected and demanded of you. If I was the owner of a team, that’s what I would expect and demand.

I don’t know if you have to weigh players every week [like the Heat do]. But that should be the mindset of every NBA player, to be in the best physical shape possible because your body is your office. And if you want to maintain that office building you’ve got to take care of it. Just like if you had an office building, you’d clean it, you’d keep it pristine, you wouldn’t let it get all junked up because this is your place of business. And your body is your place of business and you've gotta take care of it.

How would you have fared as a player inside the bubble?

I would’ve been fine because that’s how I live my life. I don’t go anywhere. I stay inside. I work out at home. I watch a lot of TV, I do a lot of reading. I’m not anti-social, but I could easily exist in the bubble because even now when I travel, before the pandemic, I would never leave the hotel. I’d just stay in the hotel the whole time. I was like that as a player! We would travel to New York and all these other cities and I wouldn’t go on the town. I’d stay in the hotel and relax.

We stay in six-star hotels. The food is gourmet. So I like to go down to the lobby restaurant, take my iPad or reading material, take my headphones and watch my favorite shows while I enjoy a good meal all by myself. Isolation and me are like best friends. I’ve been social distancing for 40 years.

You’re one of the most quotable players in NBA history. Once, right after you became teammates with Magic and Kareem, you said: “I don’t want to let these guys down. I’d rather have to face an IRS auditor than face these guys.” Do you have a favorite quote that you’ve said over the years?

I guess one of my favorites that stands out to me is when I was playing against Mark Aguirre. Do you remember Mark Aguirre? And they asked me ‘What’s it like defending Mark Aguirre?’ Because he was a great scorer, 25-point-per-game scorer. And you’ve gotta remember this was the 80’s, so you’ve got to remember the era. I said, ‘Trying to stop Mark Aguirre is like trying to convince yourself Brook Shields is ugly.’ And then another one. We lost on the road some place, and I said ‘I guess we’re just more comfortable playing in air we can see.’

Where do these lines come from?

I don’t know. They just pop up in your head, just being silly, just always trying to giggle and laugh and have a good time through life and not take everything so seriously. I grew up in an era watching Redd Foxx and Richard Pryor. And Archie Bunker and Don Rickles. Those kind of guys make you laugh and put you in a good mood.

But I knew my place. Once I got to the arena, all goofing around was over with because Magic and Riley didn’t tolerate that.

How is Klay doing?

Klay is doing great. He’s doing all basketball activities, been cleared for that. He was just at the Warriors training camp last week, practicing with the team and by all indications he’ll be ready to go in January when the season starts up again. And as far as the Warriors are concerned, they’ll be back in the title mix next year. They won’t be the favorite, like they were a couple years ago when KD was there, but they’ll be in the mix in the Western Conference, along with the Nuggets and the Lakers and the Clippers.

Klay’s been saying the Lakers are looking good. I said ‘yeah, man we’re about to get that 17th championship.’ He’s definitely paying attention to what’s going on.

That 17th championship isn’t going to sit well with Celtics fans.

The Lakers did it the hard way because after Boston piled up a lot of their championships in the 50’s, when they had 8 or 9 or 10 teams, the Lakers have been able to do it when the league has expanded globally, and even more competition has come into the league.

I’m feeling the same way [as Celtics fans] but about tennis. I don’t want Rafael Nadal to win the French Open and catch my boy Roger Federer with 20 majors. It’s pissing me off, too. I wanted Federer to hold that record forever.

Originally Appeared on GQ