Max Borenstein is living a dream. The Godzilla vs. Kong screenwriter grew up in Los Angeles, watching the Showtime Lakers and cheering for Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar; decades later, he’s the cocreator and showrunner of HBO’s Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty. But nothing can prepare you to face criticism from your idols.

Based on sports writer Jeff Pearlman’s book Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s, the hit drama—which has already been greenlit for season two—is also a major miss, at least according to many of those chronicled. Abdul-Jabbar penned a scathing essay, while lawyers for Jerry West, the Hall of Fame player and former Lakers coach and general manager, have demanded a retraction, apology, and damages for the allegedly “false and defamatory portrayal” of West, played by actor Jason Clarke, as an “out-of-control, intoxicated rage-aholic.”

In a recent statement, HBO came to the defense of Borenstein and company: “Winning Time is not a documentary and has not been presented as such. However, the series and its depictions are based on extensive factual research and reliable sourcing, and HBO stands resolutely behind our talented creators and cast who have brought a dramatization of this epic chapter in basketball history to the screen.”

Winning Time concluded its first season with Sunday’s “Promised Land,” in which the Magic-led Lakers ended their own first season with an NBA championship. To talk about the finale, the detractors, and the future, we went one-on-one with Borenstein.

Vanity Fair: When I do these season postmortems with showrunners, it’s often, “Oh, man, how did you arrive at this shocking conclusion?!” But, here, any die-hard NBA fan or human with Google knew that the Lakers win the 1980 title. So how did you go about making sure it didn’t feel anticlimactic?

Max Borenstein: It’s twofold: It’s making sure that it’s not anticlimactic, and it’s making sure that it’s not climactic, because this is only the beginning of the story. I think people know the broad strokes of this story from the 30,000-foot view, but that’s in the same way that you know the broad strokes of an adaptation of a great novel or Shakespeare. Just the fact that you know the what doesn’t mean you understand the how or the why. And it actually liberates us so that we can still have some surprises for the audience, because there are many things people don’t know, like about the Jack McKinneys of the world who have been forgotten.

People tell most sports stories specifically because they have an end. The template is, you win, you lose. In our case, we’re doing something different. We’re telling an epic that happens to be in the world of sports, but, in many ways, what it’s really about is what happens after. From the very beginning, you meet characters who are entering a second act of their lives or scrounging about hoping that they’ll find a second act in their lives. Jerry West, Pat Riley—those are guys who’ve won, and then the end of sports came and they stared out into the abyss, asking themselves, “Now what?” So hopefully we can dramatize the episode in a way that surprises and engages, while still digging into these fundamental questions where you realize that the victory itself is complicated and nuanced.

I’m interested in how you’re pacing both this season and the series. What was it like plotting out year one, knowing you have 10-plus years of content to work into what probably won’t be 10-plus seasons of a show?

I don’t know if we’ll have 10 seasons, but I know how many seasons it should be in order to do it right. Precisely because people can go to the Wikipedia page and find out “what happened,” there’s no point in doing a show that just recreates those events and adds a few jokes and takes you through the decade in a couple years. By definition, if you’re spending your real estate on moving that quickly through time, you can’t possibly go deep into any characters or the experience, and those are the things that were more exciting and interesting for me. It became clear very early on that the interesting version of this story needed to be slowed down—and still a tremendous amount of stuff happens in this season. Every episode is chock-full of incidents, murders, and pregnancies! [Laughs.] While the nostalgia stuff is a lovely aspect of making a show about a period people remember, if that’s all you’ve got, then you’ve got a pretty shallow pool. This is a great American epic that deserves a novelistic approach.

When we talked ahead of the series premiere, you said your team’s philosophy was that the moments that seemed the craziest had to be 100% true. But as an NBA nerd, I realized the show does change little things here or there. The big road trip for instance: The show positions it like this was the first time they were playing the Celtics, even though they’d technically already played in L.A. Then you altered how the game in Boston actually played out. How did you decide where you were comfortable taking liberties, and also where it was worth taking those liberties?

What we’re striving for is the truth of the story. In the example that you just gave of the road trip that leads to the Boston game, we made a choice where we knew that there’s a few truths that we had to convey. One was—and Paul Westhead talks a lot about this in his recent book—that there was a little burst of winning when he took over, almost in a kind of “rally around the flag” effect. But then they had major struggles, and he was confident that if he kept losing on this particular road trip, he would be fired. We also knew that this was the episode we wanted to finally face Boston and have Larry Bird and Magic have their rematch, and that we wanted to bring the team through Lansing, which was something that they did frequently whenever they came to the upper Midwest. It was important for the storytelling to have that scene of the team visiting Magic’s house and having Kareem with Magic’s father.

We can’t show all 82 games, and so we folded those things together. Part of the art of dramatization, as opposed to a documentary or some strict reportage of fact, is making choices.

Speaking of choices, some of the people portrayed have been, let’s say, not pleased with Winning Time. I’m guessing you didn’t expect Jerry West or Kareem to be sending you a bottle of Champagne and a thank-you card, but were you prepared for this kind of reception?

I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have any part of my life adapted into a show or movie; I don’t know if I could watch something that was made about my life if I wasn’t making it. So I would never predict or judge anyone’s reaction to it.

But we’re so proud of what we’ve done. We remain enormous fans of the era, of all of these characters and everything these people have accomplished. We made this from a place of great appreciation, affection, and fandom. And beyond that, we’ve made it with a tremendous amount of research. We spent three years reading every book, watching every interview. One of the great benefits of telling a story about people who’ve lived their lives in the public eye is that, in many cases, they’ve written their own stories. Our only main character who doesn’t have a biography or an autobiography is Jerry Buss. Jerry West’s memoir, West by West: My Charmed, Tormented Life, is one of the best books I’ve ever read about an athlete’s life. It’s a beautiful, poignant, and very self-revelatory memoir, and that was one of our great sources, as were Kareem’s books and many, many others.

We strive to always root our show in the facts, and one of the things that’s been really cool has been watching reactions from the audience where they’re surprised by some of the characterizations or by the way that they meet these people. Because what they’ve come to know is the legendary icon who has become a statue outside an arena, but when they meet these people, Pat Riley’s got a mustache and shaggy hair, and he doesn’t look like what you thought Pat Riley looks like. We want the audience to cheer when Pat Riley finally puts his hair and style all together, as you might cheer as Batman finally puts on the cowl. Or when you finally have Jerry West step into an office that says, “General Manager,” that should be a moment where people feel like they’ve seen these legends really arrive. Because those ends aren’t inevitable in life when you’re living it. We look back with hindsight but watching the evolution of these lives is something that I think is really relatable.

Since we’re talking about grievances, it’s my turn to pick a bone with you: You really have my Celtics looking like jerks out here! As we move forward and this rivalry really starts to heat up, will we see more from the Celtics’ point of view?

Yes! There is no Lakers dynasty without the Celtics dynasty. They’re two sides of the same coin, just like Magic and Bird, or Red [Auerbach] and Buss. The way I think about it is the way that George R. R. Martin would think about the White Walkers. You have to burn that slowly so people really feel that build. We all know the history; it’s been passed down generationally. And you can’t get that in one season. Think about how satisfying it’s going to be when we gradually have these guys desperate to face one another, have them just miss and have them flirt with it. And then when we eventually get to 1984, it’s going to blow people’s minds—because, even though they know what’s coming, they’re going to care about the people.

I previously asked Winning Time producer Adam McKay if he thought by the end of the season, it would be easier or harder for him to get Lakers tickets. He admitted it would probably be harder. So, as the season comes to a close, I now put the same question to you.

[Laughs.] Well, I share some Lakers season tickets already, and so I think we’ll be all right.