Basketball · 1987 · Boston, USA
Bird Steals It
Down by a point with five seconds left and the ball about to go to the other team, Larry Bird reads an inbounds pass, steals it, and sets up the winning basket himself.
Celtics 108-107 Pistons
Result
5 seconds
Time remaining at steal
1987 Eastern Conference Finals, Game 5
Series
The Boston Celtics trailed the Detroit Pistons 107-106 with five seconds remaining in Game 5 of the 1987 Eastern Conference Finals, and Detroit had the ball out of bounds under their own basket, needing only to inbound it cleanly to run out the clock. Isiah Thomas prepared to pass in to centre Bill Laimbeer in the low post.
Larry Bird, guarding the passing lane, read Thomas's eyes toward Laimbeer an instant before the pass was released, stepped in front of it, and stole the ball cleanly along the sideline. Without hesitating, Bird found teammate Dennis Johnson cutting to the basket, who scored the winning layup with one second left on the clock.
The Celtics won 108-107, a result that eliminated Detroit's chance to close out the series at home and forced it back to Boston. The play is remembered as one of the purest examples of Bird's court awareness and instinct, a game decided in the space of about two seconds by a player seeing something before it happened.
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