This post contains spoilers for the Season Two finale of HBO’s Winning Time, now streaming on Max.
Winning Time, the HBO drama about the Los Angeles Lakers’ Showtime dynasty in the Eighties, has been accused by members of those teams of rewriting history. With what unexpectedly turned out to be a series, and not season, finale, the show had to rewrite its own past, as well as its future.
Early in the summer, critics were given screeners of all seven episodes of this abbreviated second season. The version of the finale available at that time ended with Quincy Isaiah’s Magic Johnson sitting on the floor of a Boston Garden locker room shower, getting soaked in his uniform jersey and shorts, dejected over losing the 1984 NBA Finals to Larry Bird’s Celtics. The final version that debuted tonight was roughly the same up until that point, but Magic’s sad shower was…
