It wasn’t long after the smoke had cleared, not only on the first NBA championship of the Shaquille O’Neal-Kobe Bryant era, but also on the smoldering police cars outside the Staples Center.
The Lakers were gathering for a victory parade, and O’Neal and Bryant were giddy. It wasn’t supposed to happen so fast, in coach Phil Jackson’s first season, but it did. Suddenly, everyone was being decked with garlands of praise. It seemed then, even though the Lakers came close to defeat in the playoffs, first against Sacramento and then Portland, that it was destined and inevitable and merely the beginning of a new dynasty.
Shaq and Kobe. Kobe and Shaq. As the old high school cheer went, “He’s our man; if he can’t do it, the other one can.”
“Those two guys came to me and said they had so much fun they wanted to do it again,” Jackson said. “I said I could understand where they were coming from, but I told them it was doubly hard the second time through.”
There might be twice as many injuries, though O’Neal didn’t realize that applied to both his thumbs.
At least no one is saying O’Neal is all thumbs as a shooter, though his woeful free-throw shooting is worse than ever this season, about 40 percent.
There’s also about half the motivation of a year ago, when most of the players had those big albatrosses of failure hanging around their necks.
“There seems to be a little bit of satisfaction for accomplishing what they set out to,” Lakers assistant Tex Winter said, citing defense, rebounding and turnovers as problem areas.
There also seems to be twice as much jealousy, which is hard to quantify, though there appears to be at least a little green amid all that purple. Bryant has again grown distant from his teammates, and the ice is thickening between him and O’Neal–Shaq has a hand signal to alert teammates when not to throw the ball to Bryant. They’re dueling not only opponents but one another for the basketball.
“I’d planned on moving Kobe to small forward this season,” Jackson said. “It’s given him more freedom to score down there, and now there’s a little bit of a tango between the two of them trying to figure it out.”
Last tango in L.A.?
And the Bulls thought they had problems.
The Bulls, who’ll play the Lakers here Sunday night, wish they had some of those problems. The Lakers were still 6-3 going into Saturday’s game at Denver and, conflicts aside, O’Neal and Bryant are two of the elite stars in the game.
“It could take time for us to jell again–a week, a month, all year,” O’Neal said. “I’m not worried.”
No reason to be just yet. The issues the Lakers face are ones Jackson is accustomed to, having gone through repeat seasons with the Michael Jordan-Scottie Pippen Bulls of the 1990s, when inner turmoil seemed ready to tear at the fabric of the championship banners.
But O’Neal and Bryant are new to this championship stuff, and though the Lakers retain the level of arrogance that comes with being champions, they are starting to display the cracks in their foundation that can cause everything they’ve built to come crashing down around them.
“This is really why I’m here, to fix the tussles with the wills of these guys,” Jackson said. “That’s what coaches do. There always are tussles in basketball. It’s always a willful sport. You’ve got guys willing to do their thing against the will or maybe the good of the team. What it’s all about is how to corral that and make it into a community effort. We’ve been able to do that, and there are times that it springs back up. I haven’t identified [the problem] yet, but I can sense it.”
Maybe it’s so many new players in different positions.
Horace Grant now starts at power forward, and with Bryant moving to small forward, Brian Shaw has been starting in the backcourt with Ron Harper as Jackson tries to work in Isaiah Rider. The notorious Rider has been finishing games and has been relatively calm, except he too often pulls up his shirt to point to his heart after making a shot.
So there is much new for the defending champions to assimilate.
“We’re kind of refamiliarizing ourselves with where Shaq likes the ball, we’re dickering with the lineup, and it’s kind of destroyed our timing,” Jackson said. “We’re not using the capabilities we have right now.”
The results have been mediocre.
The Lakers have lost at home to Utah on the road to Houston and San Antonio. O’Neal, averaging 28 points per game, and Bryant, averaging 26, are in the top 10 in scoring, but then it’s all the way down to Rider at 10. Admired for their defense last season, the Lakers rank in the middle in most categories and are allowing more points than the league average.
“There is an air about winning that’s nice to have,” Jackson said. “You can carry it on the court, but you have to play as hard if not harder than the year before.
“We were not prepared for the intensity we have been met with this year. I don’t think it’s complacency. We’re just not season-hardened, which is partially my fault because I brought them through training camp easier after a hard season like that, and it’s backed us up a little.”
Also, O’Neal has been bothered by annoying injuries to both thumbs, if not the annoying habits of Byrant.
Bryant has been at his cocky best this season, walking back into the huddle late in Thursday’s dramatic overtime win in Sacramento and telling the team he wasn’t going to let them lose. He didn’t, with a tying three at the end of regulation and eight points in overtime. He returned to the bench yelling, “Nobody can guard me when the money’s on the line.”
It was his fifth straight game with at least 30 points, and in the last four he’d taken more shots than O’Neal, the O’Neal who became the new Wilt Chamberlain in last season’s Finals, carrying the Lakers to the title by averaging 38 points and 17 rebounds in the series.
Now the big guy seems a little hurt, partly by the departure of Glen Rice, the Lakers’ best perimeter threat. In Rice’s absence, teams are collapsing more around Shaq, and they’re certainly not afraid to foul him.
“I’ll read defenses better,” O’Neal said, “but I would like them to get me the ball in better positions, like where Karl Malone gets it.”
Bryant, scoring 10 points higher than his career average, said he’ll try.
“I’m figuring it out, man,” he said. “I’m figuring it out, and I’m just getting started.”
So are the Lakers. We’ll see where it takes them.
