The Los Angeles Lakers are a professional basketball team based in Los Angeles, California that competes in the National Basketball Association (NBA), which was formerly called the Basketball Association of America (BAA). Since 1999, the Lakers have played their home games at Staples Center. The Lakers' franchise was founded in 1946 in Detroit, Michigan before moving to Minneapolis, where the team got its official title from the state's nickname, Land of 10,000 Lakes. The Lakers won five championships before relocating to Los Angeles in the 1960–61 NBA season. The Lakers went on to lose all of their eight appearances in the NBA Finals in the 1960s, despite having help from Elgin Baylor and Jerry West. In 1972, the Lakers compiled a 33-game winning streak, the longest streak in U.S. professional team sports, and won their sixth title under coach Bill Sharman. The Lakers' popularity soared in the 1980s when they won five additional championships during a nine-year span with the help of Hall of Famers Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, James Worthy and coach Pat Riley, the franchise's all-time leader in both regular season and playoff games coached and wins. Two of those championships during that span were against their arch-rivals, the Boston Celtics. With the team of Shaquille O'Neal, Kobe Bryant and Hall of Fame coach Phil Jackson, the Lakers played in four of the first five NBA Finals of the 21st century; winning three consecutively from 2000 to 2002, and losing the fourth in 2004. The Lakers would then conclude the decade with three straight Finals appearances; losing to the Boston Celtics in 2008 but then prevailing with back-to-back championships against the Orlando Magic in 2009 and the Boston Celtics in 2010. The 2010 championship marks the 16th NBA championship in Lakers franchise history.
There have been 338 past and current players who has appeared in at least one game for the Lakers franchise.