The Los Angeles Lakers playoff run in 2001 is one of the greatest achievements in NBA history. Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal’s team only lost one game in the playoffs and dominated like hardly any other team before. However, the path to this goal was extremely rocky: numerous power struggles made the season degenerate into a soap opera in the meantime.
It’s a little funny. The moment that marked the 2001 finals did not belong to a Lakers player, but to Allen Iverson, when he single-handedly defeated the ShaKobe Lakers in Game 1 and climbed over Guard Ty Lue after a hit throw. It was supposed to be the Lakers’ only defeat in this postseason, the ultimate climax of the era of Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal in the City of Angels.
A year later, the third title in a row was to follow, but already in 2000/01 the first cracks appeared in LaLa-Land – despite the magic run in spring, which was unique at that time and was only repeated by the Golden State Warriors in 2017 (16-1).
There are many books about Shaq, Kobe and the Lakers of that time, so much drama was offered by those years. The 2000/01 season was no exception. The problems began already in the preparation, when the diesel emerged completely out of shape in the training camp. The centre, who brought the best season of his career to the field last year, celebrated the title a little too extensively and carried around numerous kilos too much.
Kobe is very different. “He told me that in the off-season he worked hard on his throw, his moves to become the best player in the league,” recalled assistant coach Tex Winter. When Bryant saw the overweight Shaq, it started to bubble in Kobe. At the same time, the then number eight was angry that coach Phil Jackson more or less overlooked Big Fella’s lack of discipline.
So the season began with a cockfight between the two great egos. On the one hand O’Neal, the elemental force, the tank, which could not be defended and had been elected final MVP 2000 and on the other hand the ambitious 23-year-old Kobe, who emulated his idol Michael Jordan and wanted to run the shop himself.
The start was accordingly bumpy, many victories against weak teams were not very convincing. To make matters worse, playmaker Derek Fisher broke his foot. The Lakers were sleepwalking through the first half of the season and defensively they often lacked intensity – which was also due to Shaq, who in his opinion was not sufficiently involved in the Kobe offense.
“He told us: “If he is not the focus in the offense, we should not expect him to play hard defense,” Winter revealed. But it wasn’t just Shaq who had to listen to criticism, Bryant was also confronted with accusations that he had to deal with for long periods of his career. He plays selfishly, he doesn’t know what it means to play in a team and only looks at himself. On the other hand, the Shooting Guard led the league in scoring, securing the Lakers’ skin several times.
Bryant was annoyed by the constant criticism of his person and went on the offensive in January. “One morning I woke up and decided that I would not be influenced by it any more,” explained the mamba. A cover story on ESPN caused a stir when Bryant criticized his fellow players and concluded that he had to do more himself. He warned his teammates before the release, but either way this didn’t go down well at all.
Especially Shaq was beside himself about these comments, rumors arose that the center behind the scenes tried to push a trade from Kobe. In an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, the Zen master himself also poured oil on the fire when he claimed that Bryant had manipulated games during his high school years so that he himself would end up a hero. This, of course, fuelled the trade rumors, which Jackson did not refute either. When the successful coach on the Jay Leno Show was asked if he wanted to announce a Kobe trade, he just smiled away.
Defending the title became almost a minor matter, the entire organisation seemed to get entangled in power games and get lost in them.
But the team found their way back in time, just in a phase when Bryant was injured in the last moves of the regular season. Shaq consequently wrote later in his book that this circumstance brought the team together. Without Kobe, the Lakers finished the Regular Season with eight wins in a row and thus snatched the division crown from the Kings with 56 wins. However, the Spurs (58-24) had the best record in the West.
Page 1: The Shaq and Kobe drama begins
Page 2: A historic playoff run