The Lakers had long been known as an organization that generated a goodly number of rumors. This was due in no small part to Jerry West, who over the years had come to include a variety of people—players, officials with other teams, even reporters and broadcasters—in his circle of confidants. Thus it was of no great surprise that, as the Lakers made their way through the 2000 playoffs, a rumor began circulating that West was planning to leave the team after four decades as a player, coach, and executive. West had seemingly contemplated retirement, or at least contemplated leaving the organization, virtually ever year for a decade, but now, according to the rumor, he had finally come to the end.
Since Jackson had taken over as coach, West had largely kept his distance from the team, and by spring he seemed thoroughly detached from the proceedings. He had made appearances at a few playoff games, but for many others he stayed away, trusting one friend or another to keep him abreast of the score with a call to his cell phone.
Ostensibly, the reason for his absences was that the games simply made him too nervous to watch. But soon there were indications that West had stayed away because of increasingly hard feelings over his status with the organization he had served so long. He had lost control of the team to Jackson, a development assured by the coach’s success in the playoffs.
“Ultimately what hurt Jerry was his inability to hire an effective coach,” explained one longtime Lakers staffer. That inability had opened the door for Jackson.
Once the season ended, West’s agonizing over his future with the team intensified. His fretting over leaving the Lakers had come to be something of an annual offseason activity, but this time he appeared closer than ever to leaving. He stayed away from the office the entire summer and offered little input on the personnel decisions the team would have to make.
Word of West’s deliberations reached the press not long after the team celebrated its championship victory with a parade through downtown L.A., but on one in the organization would confirm that West planned to retire. Then, in July, broadcaster Larry Burnett, working as a freelancer for the CBS television affiliate in Los Angeles, contacted Jackson at his home in Montana and received on-the-record confirmation that indeed West’s forty-year tenure with the team was finished.
It would be weeks before West himself would make that declaration, after a wry aside about Jackson’s sense of timing. West made his announcement in early August in a brief written statement that thanked many but made no mention of Jackson, even though the coach had just directed West’s beloved Lakers to a championship.
At the time, news reports out of Los Angeles indicated West was unhappy that Jackson, after the breakup of his marriage to wife June, had taken up with Jeanie Buss. West was said to fear what would happen to the team if the owner’s daughter and Jackson had a falling out.
West’s fears aside, it would become increasingly clear to Jackson’s associates that the romance was rather heated. “Phil’s in love,” explained one friend, an admission that Jackson himself would later make publicly. The irony in this was that Jeanie Buss had been decidedly against hiring Jackson, mainly because he displaced Kurt Rambis, husband of her good friend Linda Rambis. But when the new coach and the owner’s daughter met at a team function in Portland not long after Jackson came on board, she quickly reversed her opinion. A marketing vice president with the team, Buss quickly impressed Jackson and his assistants. “She’s cute and smart,” Tex Winter explained.
For the first time in his career, Jackson wasn’t just tight with ownership. He was sleeping with it.
The Ouster
Not long after West’s announcement a new sort of rumor began making the rounds of the league’s innermost circles. According to the story, Jackson had “kicked West out of the Lakers locker room” at one point during the post-season as the team was making its run for the NBA title.
Although most were reluctant to discuss it publicly, an official with the Bulls said he had heard about the incident, as did Eddie Jones, the former Lakers who talked frequently with many of his former teammates, including Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal. A West admirer, Jones had spoken privately with West as well, before West announced his retirement from the team in August. Jones said he had heard the story and he wasn’t shocked by it. “I knew it was coming,” Jones said.
West had long been considered the BNA’s best personnel executive. But he had also been known for the intense competitive streak that had led him to obsess about his team, a factor that made the Lakers a difficult team to coach. Jones, an All-Star who played four years in Los Angeles before being traded to Charlotte in the middle of the 1999 season, had witnessed the tension firsthand.
“As a coach, you gotta have guys’ confidence, you gotta have guys who believe in what you’re saying,” Jones said of the circumstances. “You don’t want anybody in their ear saying this and saying that.”
The story about the rumor, complete with the comments from Jones, was published by this reporter in the Chicago Sun-Times, which led to howls and complaints that no such thing had happened.
One reporter, Los Angeles Times pro basketball writer Mark Heisler, was certain no such incident had happened. If it had, West’s coterie of confidants would have quickly spread the word, Heisler asserted in a radio interview and in a story for the website. Yet no sooner had he made his evaluation than Heisler heard from one of West’s friends that the rumor was indeed true. Jackson had asked West to leave the locker room, but Heisler was told that the coach had asked politely.
Sources within Jackson’s tight inner circle declined to confirm that such an incident took place. If Jackson did ask West to leave the locker room, said one close Jackson associate, it perhaps happened at the end of a game, when Jackson liked to speak privately with his players for a few moments without interruption.
Jackson and his associates were clearly concerned about any suggestion that Jackson hastened West’s retirement. After all, as one Jackson associate pointed out, West has spent most of the past decade expressing his frustration with his job and teetering on the brink of retirement.
However, several months later Winter would confirm that, coming into the job, the new Lakers coaching staff had believed working with West would present difficulties. Jackson in particular had concluded he would not be able to coexist with West in Los Angeles. Jackson and his staff saw West as too weird, too unpredictable, possessing too much ego (which to some sounded much like Jackson himself). Even one very loyal longtime Lakers staff member acknowledged that West had always been “an active general manager,” brilliant in his acquisition of players but too anxiety-ridden and meddlesome to allow the team to settle down and function smoothly.
Ye, Winter acknowledged that Jackson had merely asked West out of the locker room that day. But the coach had done so in front of the team, and that sent a clear message that West was not part of the group. The Lakers players were clearly surprised by Jackson’s request.
Jackson’s move was a huge blow to a huge ego, and it served the purpose of pushing West over the edge toward retirement. At least one Chicago Bulls official was eager to cite the locker-room situation as more evidence that Jackson was really the one to blame for the 1998 breakup of the six-time world champion Bulls teams led by Michael Jordan.
Winter never bought the scenario that Jackson was the primary culprit regarding the hard feelings in Chicago. To the contrary, Winter offered the opinion that Jackson had spent years bending over backward to accommodate the difficult nature of Bulls vice president Jerry Krause.
Certainly Krause had shown a penchant for inciting controversy long before Jackson arrived on the scene in Chicago, and since the coach’s departure Krause had demonstrated an ability to offend and alienate. Milwaukee Bucks forward Tim Thomas confided to associates that while being recruited by the Bulls during the 2000 offseason he found Krause and team chairman Jerry Reinsdorf to be unbelievably arrogant. The free agent Thomas, in fact, turned down many millions from the Bulls to remain with the Bucks.
Like Krause, Jackson had had his own dance with conflict over the years, but where Krause seemed to step in it unwittingly, Jackson had always courted conflict as part of the mind games he played with opponents. It could be argued that perhaps his mind games with West were among the most effective that Jackson had ever played. His asking West out of the locker room was the final act in a virtually bloodless coup to clear up the team’s management picture.
To a select few who understood what was going on behind the scenes, the relationship between Jackson and West had unfolded as an eerie drama over the course of the season. Not long after they joined the Lakers, it became clear to Jackson and his coaches that West still enjoyed his phone conversations with Krause, and although the coaches seemed eager to express their appreciation for West, there remained a tension in the organization. West and Jerry Buss had been against acquiring Scottie Pippen, and Jackson had questioned them publicly about it, just as he would question West over the issue of a power forward. Jackson thought he needed a good one. West thought that NBA rule changes had reduced the need for a frontcourt banger. Winter agreed with West, but Jackson continued to question him publicly about it, teasing Lakers management by musing about bringing back Dennis Rodman, who had joined the Lakers for an unsuccessful stint in 1999. It was as if Jackson was testing West’s psyche with one sly probe after another.
Jackson found little ways to seemingly challenge West’s judgment, which resonated his less public difficulties with Krause in Chicago. Long before their disagreements became public, Jackson and his assistants had reached the conclusion that Krause was overstating his own personnel abilities. The key example of that came in 1995, when Krause passed over Michael Finley to take power forward Jason Caffey. The Chicago dynasty could have been kept alive with a player like Finley, the coaches would often say later.
In Los Angeles, Jackson and his coaches had no great doubts about West’s ability to find and acquire the best talent. Even so, there was no question that Jackson longed for more control in personnel matters. If he was going to sustain a run of championships in Los Angeles, which is clearly what the coaching staff endeavored to do, then Jackson needed to bring in players that fit his sophisticated approach to the game.
At the same time, Jackson didn’t want the headaches of being the team’s GM. The one time he had enjoyed personnel control—during his tenure as coach of the Albany Patroons in the CBA—Jackson had struggled with personnel chores. He had won the league championship in his second year in the league, but after that his team’s talent level declined.
With West’s departure, Mitch Kupchak would take over the personnel chores for the team. Kupchak’s style would allow Jackson the personnel input that he had wanted since the his Chicago days. Kupchak had studied for yeas under West, but he had none of the monumental ego that would clash with Jackson’s own gigantic self-concept.
Still, West’s departure didn’t pass without turbulence. As the offseason rolled along, it became clear what a challenge the team’s personnel issues would present. The Lakers needed a power forward, a backup center to give O’Neal some help, and a strong perimeter shooter. However, as training camp neared, the team had been successful in only one major offseason move, the signing of talented free-agent Isaiah Rider, a longtime NBA malcontent who figured to pose the kind of psychological coaching challenge that Jackson craved. Beyond that, however, each and every one of the team’s personnel efforts was thwarted by other teams.
Kupchak had diligently pursued the Jackson agenda, but Winter acknowledged that the team missed West. Jackson was like Krause in that no other NBA team seemed willing to do him any favors, Winter said. Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and coach Don Nelson had gone so far as to publicly congratulate themselves over breaking up a trade that would have given the Lakers forward Christian Laettner.
“People think that Phil has gotten enough already,” Winter mused. “They don’t want to help him.”
On the other hand, West was highly regarded all around the NBA and had offered the Lakers their best hope of dealing with other teams. Under the guidelines of his departure, West had agreed to at least accept the phone calls that Kupchak made to seek advice. Some insiders figured that West badly wanted to be released from his long-term Lakers contract, which would allow him to work for another team, but Jerry Buss didn’t want to give West that release. In the wake of his departure, West was left to stew unhappily, and the Lakers’ front office seemed more than a bit disoriented. After all, West had been the heart and soul of the team for so long, the competitive force that drove the organization.
The club’s financial situation didn’t help matters, either. Whereas owners in both Portland and Dallas had spent huge sums to beef up their lineups, the Lakers remained a frugal, mom-and-pop operation headed by Buss, who made known his desire to cut costs in the wake of the championship.
“It will be a challenge,” Winter said of the circumstances.
The one advantage, it seemed, was Jackson’s newfound status. With his success in Los Angeles, no longer was he considered merely “Michael’s coach,” Winter acknowledged, and some free agents would perhaps be eager to embrace Jackson’s unique approach to the game.
Help finally came in the form of a familiar face. Horace Grant, now one of the NBA’s elder statesmen at power forward, came to the Lakers from Seattle late in the offseason as part of a multifaceted trade that sent Patrick Ewing from the Kicks to the Sonics and Glen Rice and Travis Knight from Los Angeles to New York.
Although he was no longer the spry Doberman who had occupied the Bulls’ frontcourt in Jackson’s first days as a head coach, Grant still enjoyed a reputation as a fine low-post defender and rebounder. He had played alongside O’Neal in Orlando for two seasons, and the big center was eager to have him in the Lakers’ frontcourt. Completing the deal also brought a boost of confidence that Kupchak and Jackson could work together on personnel issues.
If only everything else could have gone as smoothly for the Lakers. Instead, they quickly found trouble in the early moments of the 2000-2001 season. First, O’Neal had celebrated too hard during the offseason and came into training camp way out of shape, a development that deeply disappointed Jackson and his assistants. More important, O’Neal’s lack of commitment had left the hard-working Bryant disgusted After the team won the 2000 championship, Bryant had pushed himself harder than ever, so hard that he postponed his August wedding to fiancée Vanessa Lane to keep developing his game. Asked by Winter why he had put off the big event, Bryant replied, “I’m too busy. Got too much work to do.”
Bryant’s effort was obvious as the season opened. If O’Neal wasn’t in shape to lead the team, then Bryant was determined to take over, especially on offense. It didn’t take long for the Lakers’ center to see a shift in Bryant’s approach. Much to the coaching staff’s further disappointment, O’Neal began pouting and sent this clear message: “If I’m not in the primary option on offense, don’t expect me to work hard on defense.” Of course, O’Neal wasn’t alone in his sloth. Jackson said that only forward Rick Fox and Bryant had come into camp in shape and ready to play.
From training camp, the team’s nasty chemistry began to boil just a few days into the schedule. For the 2000 season the Lakers had been a 67-winjuggernaut. But in 2001 they would struggle. In fact, the team had to close the season on a remarkable 8-0 streak just to reach 56 wins. One key factor was the loss of point guard Derek Fisher to foot surgery. He would miss three-fourths of the season before returning in March, and his absence would hurt. As assistant Bill Bertka explained, Fisher was the only Lakers guard who could provide such pressure brilliantly for the Bulls, but he was simply too old, his knees too creaky. Bryant showed a fine ability to pressure the ball, but it made him vulnerable to foul trouble.
Without ball pressure, the Lakers defense, so effective the previous season, now shriveled. The lack of defensive intensity only worsened the chemistry problems. Suddenly Jackson found himself pressed to keep discipline. In his first season in Los Angeles, he had used light fines for players’ little misdeeds, things like being late to practice and failing to get back on defense in games. But in 2001 he first doubled the fines then had to quintuple them to enforce team rules.
“I’ve had to be probably a little more firm than I’ve ever had to be as a coach in the last six year,” Jackson admitted to Howard Beck of the Los Angeles Daily News. “I just felt that they weren’t disciplined enough.”
The worst thing about O’Neal’s’ lack of conditioning was that it left him vulnerable to injury and poor play. He started the season by missing shots he usually made and shot less than 50 percent during key stretches. His free throws plunged into the 20 percent range and made him a laughingstock around the league.
With the center struggling, Bryant reasoned that he should take over the offense. It wasn’t long before O’Neal and his teammates were grumbling that Kobe was acting selfish.
Although he played well, Bryant himself struggled to find consistency. He made just 8 of 31 shots in a home loss to Milwaukee, then hit 20 of 26 and scored 45 points in a win at Houston. After the Houston win, Jackson compared him to Jordan, but O’Neal fumed that Bryant was trying to hog all the glory. It was clear that the nasty conflicts of the past had come back to life. And to some observers, the dislike seemed greater than before.
“I’m just going to play within the flow of the game,” Bryant said. “If people want to criticize that, they’re going to criticize that.”
Jackson conceded that Bryant, who was leading the league in scoring as the new year neared, was playing the best ball of his life. Some observers began calling Bryant the game’s best all-around player.
“He’s got a level of commitment to his game and to wanting to be the best that few guys have,” Phoenix suns coach Scot Skiles said. “Nobody on our team has that commitment, that’s for sure.”
The Lakers entered the new year with a e23-10 record, but there was a sense of uneasiness about the team. Bryant confided that despite his individual success he was miserable and even had doubts about his love for the game. He had worked so hard, yet his public image was that of a selfish young player. Bryant said the situation left him depressed.
He wasn’t alone. Winter, nearing his seventy-ninth birthday, pondered quitting the game he had coached for more than half a century. He was deeply disappointed in the feuding young stars. Bryant talked Winter, his mentor, out of quitting, telling Winter how important he was to Bryant and to the team. Then Bryant talked himself into getting back on track. He said he woke up one morning and decided the problem simply wasn’t worth worrying about, that it would work out if he just kept playing hard.
“I think his heart was broken,” Winter would later confide about Bryant. “But he’s young. He got over it.”
It didn’t happen immediately, though, because there was more trouble ahead for the Lakers.
New Year, Old Troubles
January brought a cover story about Bryant in ESPN Magazine in which he revealed that Jackson had come to him in November and asked him to back off his aggressive approach. Bryant said he told Jackson that instead of backing off his game he needed to step it up more.
Bryant had warned his teammates before the article came out and even tried to back off his tough talk, but the story infuriated O’Neal. The center told reporters that Bryant’s selfishness was the main reason the team wasn’t playing well. Bryant countered that O’Neal still wasn’t in shape and still wasn’t playing defense. Jackson likened the two of them to little children arguing in a sandbox. Not surprisingly, the Lakers dropped four of their next seven games. Their fifteen losses equaled the entire amount for the previous season.
The public airing of their differences perhaps helped the problem, and they played well together in a win over Cleveland. But the troubles were far from over even though both players suggested they were.
February brought injuries to O’Neal and rumors that the center was again trying to get Bryant traded (O’Neal had tried before). Although Bryant and an injured O’Neal appeared to be buddies at the All-Star Game in Washington, that wasn’t the case.
March brought more trouble, this time with a host of rumors that there was a rift between Bryant and Jackson. Meanwhile, Bryant was racked by injuries to his shoulder, his ankles, his psyche.
Toward the end of the month, Jackson made what many observers considered an unbelievable blunder in an interview with Rick Telander of the Chicago Sun-Times. The coach revealed the contents of a private conversation with Bryant and for some reason decided to discuss an old rumor about Bryant “sabotaging” his high school team’s games to make himself a game savior. Winter was furious with Jackson for his comments to the newspaper. So was Bryant’s old high school coach from Pennsylvania, Gregg Downer, who told reporters Jackson needed to apologize for spreading a story that had no basis in truth.
Bryant was clearly wounded by the betrayal, although he made little public comment. Bryant and his agent, Arn Tellem, turned to Jerry West for counsel about dealing with Jackson’s serious breach of trust. To make matters worse, Jackson got wind that Tellem was threatening a slander lawsuit against Jackson for his statement.
The turn of events prompted a host of public complaints that Jackson had done little to calm the situation between Bryant and O’Neal. It was suggested that perhaps the coach had been too much in love with Jeanie Buss to pay attention to the team. For a time it appeared to some Jackson observers that the coach might even have panicked as his team fell apart before his eyes.
It was then that Jackson apparently leaked a story to Sam Smith of the Chicago Tribune that the Lakers might well trade Bryant in the offseason. Jackson apparently had his associates imply other threats to Bryant that the young guard better get in line or face the trading block. To longtime observers, the moves were trademark Jackson, a use of media messages and other pressures to influence events.
For his part, Bryant seemed to ignore the controversy, then downplayed it when reporters asked about it. Later, reporters in Los Angeles commented that Bryant had seemed far more mature than Jackson in the matter. Bryant had quietly married Vanessa Lane during the season, and the union seemed to have an immediate calming effect on him. But as good as it was, his new family life couldn’t erase the conflicts at work.
When Jackson appeared on NBC’s “The Tonight Show,” host Jay Leno asked if he wanted to announce a trade of Kobe Bryant right on the air. To many Lakers fans, the situation seemed absurd. Trade the best guard, described by some as the best player, in basketball?
Some saw Jackson’s thoughts about trading Bryant as a sure sign that the coach had lost control of the team. Newspaper columnists and radio talk show hosts in Los Angeles speculated that Jackson could no longer manage the team. The whole situation disgusted Magic Johnson, a minority owner of the team and a Lakers vice president. “He’s not going to get traded,” Johnson said. “Just point blank. Enough said.”
“There’s no way,” agreed Tellem. “Kobe wants to be a Laker, remain a Laker, and finish his career as a Laker.”
“I definitely think it has put a strain on the organization,” Johnson said. “You never want an organization or a team to seem like it’s divided, or guys jumping on sides and things like that. Our whole organization has been built on the fact that we’ve always taken care of our own. We’ve never aired our dirty laundry. We’ve taken care of it in-house.
“Because now it’s more than Kobe and Shaq,” Johnson continued. “It’s much more than that. Now instead of focusing on basketball, we’re focusing on issues outside of basketball. And I think that’s taken a toll on the team.”
Somehow, it all didn’t matter.
Pulling Together
It may be that Los Angeles Lakers fans will never know exactly what happened late in the 2001 season to change their team from a dysfunctional collection of feuding babies into a tight-knit group of nearly unbeatable champions. Jackson, who has seen his share of tough seasons over his decades of playing and coaching professional basketball, called 2001 “my toughest season.” It was also his most mystifying.
In late March the Lakers appeared deeply divided and unable to trust one another, on their way to an early exit from the playoffs. Then, like magic, they began playing together, and instead of faltering, they set off on an extended streak, winning all of their regular-season games in April, then pushing on to finish the greatest run in NBA playoff history, a 15-1 dash to their second straight league championship.
Just what was it that made the Lakers change for good?
Was it Jackson’s working of his psychological mind games behind the scenes?
Was it O’Neal finally getting over his deep resentment of Bryant?
Was it Bryant finally becoming the playmaker that Jackson wanted him to be?
Was it Bryant learning to trust his teammates?
In the final analysis, it was all of that and more. Team psychologist George Mumford said that things weren’t quite as bad as perceived. Another factor was that Jackson had Mumford working quietly behind the scenes for months, patiently dealing with chemistry issues. The team’s mindset was healing even as tempers flared.
“We learned some things,” Jackson said, “through some real hard lessons.”
One saving grace was the March 13 return of Derek Fisher. He began making jump shots, leading the team, and running the offense. More important, as assistant Bill Bertka explained, his return meant that the Lakers could again pressure the ball, a key to the rest of their defense being effective.
“Everything that we lacked the first part of the season, he’s brought with him,” Lakers Brian Shaw said of Fisher. “His toughness, his defensive prowess, he’s been knocking down the outside shot consistently, and we just feed off his energy.”
It was during the stretch, with team anxiety at its highest, that Bryant sat out ten games with an assortment of injuries. The team went 7-3 in his absence, capped by a sweep of a four-game road trip in early April. Closing the season with an eight-game victory streak suddenly revived their confidence.
With the arrival of the playoffs, the Lakers faced Portland, Sacramento, and San Antonio, in that order. To get them ready for that run of teams with strong power forwards, Jackson spliced scenes of Gladiator into and around the scouting tapes he showed the team. As with most of his video selections for his previous teams in Chicago, Jackson was seeking to build “togetherness” for the playoffs.
“The reality is this is kind of a gladiator’s life—here today, gone tomorrow,” the coach explained. “And you’ve got to develop that teamwork and that team play, and that’s really the challenge of coaches right now and of teams. We know what we are. We know what we’re built on. We’re built on the fact that Kobe and Shaq are the best one-two combination in the game, and the complementary players around them want to play as a team and want to figure in this. As a coaching staff, we’re telling the one and two players in the game that they’ve got to include everybody on this team if we’re going to win against Portland.”
O’Neal had averaged 33.7 points over the final eleven games of the regular season, and when Bryant returned from injury, the guard showed that he was ready to build on the center’s energy. After all, O’Neal was now in shape and playing defense as well as offense. The two stars working together was the key. “It’s going to make things a lot easier,” Bryant predicted. “Then he and I can just run screen and roll. You’re going to have to pick your poison.”
Portland, Sacramento, and San Antonio all found themselves facing that choice. The Lakers swept all three on the way to an 11-0 run tot he NBA Finals against Philadelphia.
Along the way, Bryant worked as a playmaker, then found the right situation for exploding in big offensive games. His first big explosion was Game 3 against Sacramento, a 103-81 Lakers win that saw him score a playoff career-high 36 points. The Kings were keying on O’Neal, who had scored 87 points in the first two games.
“Shaq came up to us and said, ‘Don’t worry about me; you guys just do whatever it takes,’” Bryant said.
In Game 4, the Lakers’ fifteenth consecutive win, Bryant set another career high, 48 points. “Kobe was just fantastic,” Sacramento coach Rick Adelman said. “He was possessed. Even when he missed shots he got them back.”
“He’s twenty-two years of age,” Jackson said of Bryant. “I don’t know what you were like when you were twenty-two, but I doubt that you’d want to be reported about every day, about your behavior and how mature you were at that age. But his enthusiasm infuses this basketball club. That’s a real important factor to remember, that he’s got the energy, the drive, the moxie, and also a feel, an uncanny instinctual feel for this basketball game that’s really showing.”
Bryant’s two big games came just hours after a rushed trip back to Los Angeles to comfort his new wife, Vanessa, who had been hospitalized with a brief illness. Then he returned to Sacramento and destroyed the Kings.
“His maturity in this series I think really showed,” Jackson said. “His ability to not only generate scoring for us but also to have the kind of assuredness and poise that blended into the other players as they fed off his energy.”
The Bryant outburst kept its momentum in Game 1 of the Western Conference finals, a 104-90 Lakers blowout of the Spurs in San Antonio. Bryant had another 45 points to go with O’Neal’s 28.
“You’re my idol,” O’Neal told his teammate afterward. Bryant had made 19 or 35 shots, good enough to make O’Neal a surprise member of his fan club.
“He’s playing phenomenal,” the center told a crowded room of reporters and broadcasters. “I don’t know what to say. I think he’s the best player in the league. By far. When he’s playing like that—scoring, getting everybody involved, playing good defense—there’s nothing you can say. That’s where I’ve been trying to get him all year. And now I can say that he’s the best player.”
The crowd in the interview room seemed transfixed, sensing that O’Neal had made a special proclamation. “He’s doing the right thing,” he said. “Somebody once said, ‘The mark of a great player is how you make other players around you play.’ I now can truly say that Kobe Bryant is the best player in this league.”
“That shocked me,” Bryant would admit the next day. Bryant had averaged 32.5 points in eight playoff games, all Lakers victories. Lakers Horace Grant jokingly called him “Kobe Jordan.” “I’m on the bench,” said Grant. “I’m thirty-five years old. I’m a big fan. He’s moving the ball, making the shots, not being intimidated by seven-footers. And he’s only twenty-two. That’s frightening.”
“Kobe was magnificent,” Jackson agreed.
The Spurs’ Antonio Daniels found himself in a nightmare trying to guard Bryant. “You just have to continue to play him,” Daniels said. “Sometimes there’s nothing you can do. It’s kinda like when guys guarded [Michael] Jordan. You know, you can play good defense on the guy, you can cut him off, but when he stops and elevates with him being 6’7”, 6’8”, and as athletic as he is, with the ability to elevate, sometimes all you can do is put a hand up and hope he misses.”
The big win helped establish the impossibility of it all in the Spurs’ minds. They fell rather meekly in four games, with Bryant doing yet more big damage in Game 3. He made 14 of 27 shots for another 36 points. “I said a couple games ago, he’s the best player in the world,” O’Neal said. “And he is. He is. That cat is tough. He can post up, shoot, get everybody involved.”
Said Lakers forward Rick Fox, “For the people in L.A. who have followed this for a long season, that compliment coming out of Shaq speaks volumes for where we’ve taken strides as a team. People ask me, ‘Why are you playing the way you’re playing?’ It’s very evident now that we all have learned to respect each other as players and to enjoy each other’s company and understand how much we can make each other better.”
In a matter of weeks, the Lakers had put to rest months of turmoil. “What doesn’t break you is going to make you stronger,” Bryant said. “Not only were we able to come out of so much adversity that we had this season, but we’ve actually come out stronger. It was just proving people wrong, and showing ourselves we can do this and we’re going to turn this around. We’re the champions and we have to start acting like champions and playing like champions.”
By the time the league championship series rolled around, the only real surprise was that the Philadelphia 76ers managed to win a game, the first. They might not have done that if Jackson hadn’t made a coaching mistake down the stretch.
Backup guard Tyronn Lue had played well, substituting for Fisher. In fact, with Fisher going through a momentary lapse of confidence, Lue had helped the Lakers get back into the game. But over the final minutes, the coaching staff had decided it was time to put Fisher back in to run the offense. At the last minute, Jackson changed his mind. Lue stayed in and made two key mistakes that cost the Lakers the tame.
The Lakers had lost their perfect playoff record, but they paid that little mind. They simply ran through the injured Sixers in four straight games. The central ingredient in this dominance was O’Neal. He played brilliantly, blocking shots on defense (after Jackson had confronted him about failing to block a single shot in Game 1) and using his strength to control the tempo on offense. In the end, Jackson claimed his eighth title as a coach, bringing him right to the verge of Red Auerbach’s record. But Jackson had done it with two separate teams. Once again, in the delight of the celebration, it seemed that all was well with the Lakers, that their turbulence and infighting had settled, that they had bonded in their success.
Yet even then there was ample evidence that the old conflicts lingered just under the surface. On the even of the league championship series, Tim Brown of the Los Angeles Times wrote a story about Jerry West working behind the scenes to help Bryant deal with the ugly situation that had unfolded over the spring. The story infuriated Jackson and some of his associates because it seemed that West was claiming credit for the turnaround. Jackson wondered if West had leaded the story to the media.
Bryant himself offered a further dig at Jackson by showing up at the team’s championship celebration wearing a number 44 West jersey. “Jerry West was my mentor,” the young guard said. “And with everything that went on this season—he meant so much to me.”
West, in an interview with T. J. Simers of the Los Angeles Times, was only gracious in his comments, saying, “When basketball is played correctly with good players it is something great to see. It looks easy, but it’s not. That’s a tribute not only to the players but to Phil Jackson and his staff, who got the players to buy into what they wanted. That’s Phil’s plan, having all the players touch the ball and watching everyone contribute—that’s how basketball should be played.”
Changes
Although he would turn eighty in February of 2002, Tex Winter looked forward to sticking around for one more NBA season. The league had abruptly decided to allow zone defenses for the first time in its history, and Winter, an old college hand, was eager to coach the Lakers on the nuances of the zone. But he and longtime Lakers assistant Bill Bertka were surprised after the season to learn that Jackson was removing them from the bench.
“We’ve been de-benched,” Winter joked.
The issue, whoever, was no laughing matter to either of the elderly assistants. Bertka had been reassigned to scouting, and Winter had been asked to stay with the coaching staff in another capacity.
“Phil doesn’t want me there,” Winter said.
When Jackson came to the Bulls as a first-time NBA assistant in 1987, Winter was assigned to be his mentor, to teach him how to coach. They’d been together ever since, except for the season Jackson sat out after the Bulls won their sixth championship in 1998.
“He said he would miss me on the bench a lot, but he thought it was time to make a change,” Winter said of the meeting in which Jackson broke the news. “He wants me to continue to be a floor coach. That’s where I’m the most valuable to him.”
For years Winter had gone over the tapes of the team’s previous game as well as a tape of the upcoming opponent, explaining to Jackson the various factors. “He’s used that process to teach himself,” Winter said. “As we study tapes, I comment and he takes note of it. He likes that.”
Winter also had the task of planning and running much of Jackson’s practices. And Jackson wanted him to continue those parts of the relationship. He just didn’t want Winter on the bench anymore.
A Jackson associate said the move was made to ease the burden on Winter because of his age. But Winter suspected two factors to have played a role in the decision. First, Jackson seemed eager to make sure that he received the credit for the coaching of the team. Jackson had been eager to win a championship without Jordan, to prove he could do it, Winter said. “And now he seems like he wants to win one without me.”
Second, Jeanie Buss had urged Jackson to bring Kurt Rambis back to the bench. With Winter’s demotion, Jackson moved Rambis, who spent two years as the team’s assistant general manager, back to assistant coach. With the move, Winter, one of the highest-paid assistants in the league, was told he would have to take a $125,000 pay cut, plus he would miss out on the $500,000 bonuses paid to Lakers assistants when the team won a championship.
Adding insult to injury, Winter was assigned the task of writing up the team’s “calls,” or signals, and play calls, so that Rambis would know what was going on from the bench. Winter’s first thought was to resign, and over the summer other teams expressed serious interest in hiring him. In August, Winter went to New Zealand to conduct coaching clinics. During the trip he planned to decide whether to stay or go.
One factor in the decision was Winter’s close relationship with Bryant. Jackson’s difficulties with Bryant had only served to emphasize Winter’s role as Bryant’s defender on the coaching staff.
“You can’t quit,” Bryant told Winter over the summer. “If you do, I’ll go crazy.”
Asked about the situation, Bryant said, “I want the bet for Tex. I want him to do what makes him happy.”
Winter said the process of working with Jackson ha become more frustrating over the past two seasons. As his teams won championships, Jackson’s ego, already substantial, had grown. Part of Winter’s role in the past had been to keep that ego in check. But Jackson hadn’t listened like he used to, Winter said. “It’s become a question of what I’m getting across.”
Ultimately, Winter decided to remain with the team after negotiating a less-severe cut in pay. He also arranged to sit behind the bench rather than next to Jackson on it.
“They made me feel like they wanted me to stay,” he said in explaining his decision.
That decision meant that he would spend one more year helping Jackson practice his mysterious brand of basketball, that strange combination of discipline and freedom, all of it guided along by Jackson’s intuition, his special understanding of the group. Winter is one of the few with some understanding of Jackson’s mind games, the little flights of illusion that allow the coach to keep everyone slightly off balance, slightly unsure. Ultimately, though, even Winter acknowledges the impossibility of the task because Jackson inhabits that elusive realm that only he can understand.