We interrupt your usual stream of DP show content to bring you a special episode of a new podcast on the Dam Patrick show network.

It's called Westward.

Westward chronicles the history of basketball in the NBA and how the city of Los Angeles not only saved the fledgling league by bringing the Lakers from Minneapolis but gave birth to the modern NBA with Showtime.

Told through the lens of the great cherry west who helped build the dynasty of the Lakers westward now follows the former Hall of Famer as he attempts to build a dynasty with L.A.'s other NBA team, the Clippers.

Nair Raiders are Keith David, Tim Livingston, Bobby Glanton Smith.

I hope you enjoy.

This is Westward.

Westward is a production of the Dam Patrick podcast network in I Heart Radio.

The city of Los Angeles was built on ground that shifts and in June of 1960, less than a week after the team formerly known as the Minneapolis Lakers arrived in Los Angeles.

Players would experience its first taste of West Coast living when a 6.0 struck off the coast of California.

1960 emerges as the most disastrous earthquake year of modern times.

Along the California coast it swept in at an angle, ripping coastal installations and causing heavy damages.

But while the organization had to adjust to the ground moving beneath them on occasion, the NBA was amidst a much greater seismic shift as the game's power had moved to the furthest franchise on the East Coast and settled in an arena built above the North Station where the Boston and Main Railroads met.

It had originally been called Madison Square Garden, but it had been shortened to just the Garden.

Just a decade into the new NBA, when every team in the league was basically just thinking about survival, there was one team in one coach who were only thinking about basketball.

And that was Red Arbok and of course the Boston Celtics.

Because prior to the 1956 season, the teammate three moved to change the course of history in the NBA.

He built Russell, maybe remembered as the marquee pick in that draft, but he wasn't the Celtics first selection that year.

It was Tommy Heinzen, a Ford from Holy Cross.

As part of an effort to generate fan interest in the fledgling NBA, the league instituted a special rule granting teams exclusive rights to claim locally based college players.

That meant that Bill Russell, who was clearly the best player in the draft, would be next, and that's who Arbok really wanted.

And the problem was that Boston had the seventh pick and there was no way Russell was going to slide to seven.

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