1962 NBA Finals
1962 basketball championship series
The 1962 NBA World Championship Series was the championship round of the 1962 NBA playoffs, which concluded the National Basketball Association (NBA)'s 1961–62 season. The best-of-seven series was played between the Western Division champion Los Angeles Lakers and Eastern Division champion Boston Celtics. This was the Celtics' sixth straight trip to the Finals, and they won the best-of-seven series in Game 7, 110–107 in overtime. It was the second time in NBA history and the most recent Finals in which the series was decided by overtime in Game 7. The only other Finals series decided in overtime in the seventh game was the 1957 Finals.
Series summary
Celtics win series 4–3
Team rosters
Boston Celtics
Los Angeles Lakers
Box scores
Jerry West steals Sam Jones' inbound pass and hit the game winning buzzer-beater.
Elgin Baylor's 61 points sets a Finals record for an individual scorer in a game.
Celtics center Bill Russell set a still-standing record for rebounds in a 7-game series with 189, and tied his own record for rebounds in a single game with 40 in Game 7. In the last 5 seconds of regulation in Game 7, Los Angeles’ Frank Selvy missed an open 12-footer from the baseline that would have won the championship for the Lakers and ended the Celtics dynasty. Instead, the game went into overtime in which the Celtics won the game and thus the title.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “1962 NBA Finals” as 1962 basketball championship series. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as 1962 basketball championship series. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3072460. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1962, 1961 and 1957.
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This entry incorporates text from “1962 NBA Finals” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.