Four historic teams. Four legendary players. One unforgettable season.

The 1980s were a transformative decade for the NBA. The league had evolved from a bruising, earthbound game of mostly nameless, underpaid players to one in which athletes became household names for their thrilling, physics-defying play. The 1987–88 season was the peak of that golden era, a year of drama that featured a pantheon of superstars in their prime battling for the title, and for their respective legacies.

In When the Game Was War, bestselling author Rich Cohen tells the story of this incredible season through the four teams, and the four players, who dominated it: Larry Bird and the Boston Celtics, Magic Johnson and the Los Angeles Lakers, Isiah Thomas and the Detroit Pistons, and a young Michael Jordan and his Chicago Bulls.

For anyone who longs to understand how the NBA came to be the cultural juggernaut it is today, and drawing from dozens of interviews with basketball insiders, When the Game Was War brilliantly recasts one unforgettable season and the four transcendent players who were at the center of it all.

Story Locale:1980s America