by Phil Jackson
The fifth game, in San Antonio, was when the magic really happened. We were up by 16 in the third quarter, but the Spurs clawed back and regained the lead in the closing minutes. With eleven seconds left Kobe put up a twenty-footer that gave us a 72–71 edge. That set up what should have been the final play with five seconds on the clock: an off-balance fallaway eighteen-footer by the Spurs’ Tim Duncan that miraculously went in.
The Spurs started jumping up and down as if the game already had been won. I told the players at the time-out that even though there was less than half a second left on the clock, we were still going to win. Payton took the ball out of bounds, and Robert Horry, who knew our last-second shot set, took the passing lane away. As a result, Gary had to call another time-out. This time I told him to look for the open man, whoever it was, and he found Fish breaking free on the left side of the key. With nanoseconds left, Fish grabbed the pass and shot a miracle turnaround jumper. Swish. Game.
—
We put away the Spurs in game 6 and proceeded to take apart the Timberwolves in six games to win the Western Conference finals. But Malone reinjured his knee in the last game, which disrupted our momentum and put a big question mark over the upcoming championship finals against the Detroit Pistons.
Even before Malone’s accident, I was nervous about the Pistons. They were a young, cohesive team that was peaking at the right moment, having just won the Eastern Conference finals against the team with the league’s best record, the Indiana Pacers. Our players didn’t take the Pistons that seriously because they didn’t have a lot of big-name stars, but they were coached by one of the best, Larry Brown, and created tough matchup problems for us. Chauncey Billups, a strong, inventive playmaker, could easily outrun Payton or Fisher; Tayshaun Prince, a six-nine, long-armed defender, would give Kobe trouble; and we had no good answer for their power-forward double threat of Rasheed Wallace and Ben Wallace. Brown’s strategy was to draw offensive fouls on Shaq by having his big men fall down when he backed in. Before each series I spent a lot of time visualizing new ways to neutralize our next opponent’s attack. With the Pistons, I was drawing a blank.
It started with game 1 in L.A. The Pistons outmaneuvered us defensively and grabbed back home-court advantage, even though Shaq and Kobe combined to score 59 points. We rebounded in game 2 and squeaked out a win in overtime. But when the series moved to Detroit, we started to struggle and weren’t able to recover. Malone’s knee continued to cause him problems and the engine ground to a halt. The Pistons roared to victory in five games.
My biggest disappointment during this season was our inability to shut out all the distractions and mold this talented group of superstars into the powerhouse it should have been. There were some great individual performances—from Kobe, Karl, and others—but in the end we remained a collection of mostly aging veterans with tired legs, struggling to keep up with a young, hungry, energetic team that was not unlike the Lakers of a few years past.
To Fox, the reason we lost was simple. “A team always beats a group of individuals,” he said. “We picked a poor time to be a group of individuals.”
For Fish, the demise of the Lakers started much earlier, in the middle of our third championship run. As soon as success became a normal part of the team’s culture, he says, “the players started to take more credit for what was happening. So there was less focus on what the coaching staff brought to the equation and more focus on whose team it was. Was it Shaq’s team or Kobe’s team? And which guys on our roster needed to step up and get better? All those things began to creep into the locker room, and it really changed the energy and the cohesion that was there those first few years.”
—
The collapse happened quickly. Shortly after the playoffs ended, Dr. Buss confirmed what Mitch Kupchak had already told me. He said that the team was moving in a different direction and wouldn’t be renewing my contract. And not surprisingly, he was planning to trade Shaq and hoped to re-sign Kobe. I told Dr. Buss that losing Shaq would probably mean handing over at least one championship to whoever got him. He said he was willing to pay that price.
My prophecy came true. In mid-July, the Lakers traded Shaq to Miami, and he led the Heat to a championship two years later. One day after the Shaq trade, the Lakers announced that Kobe had re-signed with the team. His trial in Colorado proceeded with jury selection on August 27 and was over by September 1. The judge dismissed the charges after the prosecution dropped the case. Apparently, their key witness, Kobe’s accuser, refused to testify.
Coaching legend Cotton Fitzsimmons once said that you don’t know what kind of coach a guy’s going to be until he’s been fired. I’m not sure what this says about me, but in any case, I was ready to take a break from basketball and find some other ways to nourish my mind and spirit. I had some work to do on The Last Season, a book I was writing about my time with the Lakers. After that, I was heading far away from L.A. on a seven-week head-clearing trip to New Zealand, Australia, and various points around the South Pacific.
Despite all the intense drama, I felt good about what I’d accomplished with the Lakers during the five years I had been with the team, even though I wished I could have rewritten the ending. And I was encouraged by the positive shift in my relationship with Kobe by the time I left. Coming to terms with anger is always treacherous and inevitably puts you in touch with your own fears, frailties, and judgmental mind. But the steps Kobe and I took that season, each in our own way, laid the foundation for building a stronger, more conscious connection in the future.
When I look back at this time, it feels like the end of an important chapter for me—in a good way. Coaching the Lakers was like having a wild, tempestuous fling with a beautiful woman. And now it was time to move on and try something new.
19
CHOP WOOD, CARRY WATER
Forget mistakes, forget failures, forget everything, except what you’re going to do now and do it. Today is your lucky day.
WILL DURANT
I’d just started my sabbatical in Australia when I got a call from Jeanie. She said the situation with the Lakers was dire. The team had gone into a tailspin and the new coach, Rudy Tomjanovich, had resigned. Could I come back and save the team?
I can’t say I was surprised. Rudy was a good coach who had won two championships with the Houston Rockets, but he had inherited a no-win situation in Los Angeles. What’s more, Rudy had just completed treatment for cancer and just wasn’t up to the job physically or emotionally.
The team wasn’t up to the job either. The roster had been decimated in the off-season. Not only did the Lakers trade Shaq, but they also lost Karl Malone to retirement, Rick Fox to the Celtics (he retired a few months later), and Gary Payton and Fish to free agency. There were a few new players who came over from Miami in the Shaq trade—forward Lamar Odom, guard Caron Butler, and center/forward Brian Grant, who had knee issues. Kobe was trying to carry this as-yet-formless bunch all by himself but couldn’t.
I told Jeanie that returning to L.A. was out of the question. I wasn’t prepared to give up the rest of my trip, included a tour of New Zealand by motorcycle with my brothers. Nor did I have any interest in trying to rescue a team that was long past salvaging. “How about next season?” Jeanie asked.
“I’ll think about it,” I replied.
I suppose I might have felt a momentary flicker of schadenfreude, but, in fact, the demise of the Lakers didn’t make me happy. I’d worked hard to transform the team into a champion, and it was painful to watch my former assistant coach, Frank Hamblen, try in vain to hold things together at the end of the 2004–05 season. This was the first time the Lakers had failed to make the playoffs since the early 1990s.
When I returned home, I talked to a number of other teams with open coaching positions, including New York, Cleveland, and Sacramento. But none of those jobs appealed to me as much as the idea of rebuilding the Lakers from the ground up�
�something I hadn’t had the chance to do the first time around. But before I said yes, I needed to get a read on whether Kobe and I could work together again.
I hadn’t talked to Kobe since our tense end-of-the-season meeting a year earlier. Since then, I’d published The Last Season, in which I revealed my frustrations about trying to coach him during the turbulent 2003–04 season. I had no idea what kind of reception I’d get from him, but when I called I didn’t sense any hard feelings. Kobe’s only request was for me to be more discreet with the media and not share personal information about him with reporters. That seemed reasonable.
I think we both realized that in order to succeed we needed each other’s support and goodwill. Prior to the 2004–05 season, Kobe had boasted that as long as he played for the Lakers, the team would never fall below .500. But that’s exactly what happened: The Lakers tied for last place in the Pacific Division with a 34-48 record. That turned out to be a real wake-up call for Kobe. He’d never known such failure before, and it forced him to acknowledge that he’d have to wholeheartedly join forces with others if he was going to win any more championships.
I knew that if I accepted the job, my first crucial task would be to restore the team’s lost pride. To my mind the sports pundits and fans had turned on Kobe and blamed him—unfairly—for breaking up the Lakers’ great championship lineup. I thought my return might help put some of that noise to sleep. I was also intrigued by the possibility of building a new championship team centered on Kobe instead of Shaq. But to make that happen, Kobe and I would have to forge a deeper, more collaborative relationship, and he’d have to grow into a different kind of leader than he’d been in the past. That would take time, I knew, but I didn’t see any insurmountable obstacles in the way. Kobe seemed as eager as I was to bury the past and move on.
—
When I met with Dr. Buss to hammer out the details of a three-year deal, I needed his assurance that I’d be given a bigger role in personnel decisions and not be kept in the dark, as had been the case during the Shaq-versus-Kobe stand-off in 2003–04. Dr. Buss agreed but turned down my other request—getting part ownership of the team. Instead he offered me a salary increase and explained that he planned to hand over control of the Lakers to his six children. As part of that move, he’d brought in his son, Jim, to learn the business so that he could eventually take over the basketball side of the Lakers. Meanwhile, Jeanie would continue overseeing sales, marketing, and finance.
Jim Buss had been promoted to VP of player personnel when I returned in the 2005 postseason. He was eager to draft Andrew Bynum, a talented high-school center from New Jersey, and asked me to take a look at him when he came to L.A. for a tryout. My only reservation about Andrew was his running gait, which would lead to serious knee problems later on. But otherwise I thought he had the potential to develop into a formidable big man. I gave the deal my okay, and we made him the tenth pick overall. At seventeen, he was the youngest player ever to be drafted by the NBA.
My biggest concern about recruiting players right out of high school has always been the temptations of the NBA life. Many young players get so seduced by the money and fame that they never develop into mature young men or live up to their promise as athletes. In my view, the key to becoming a successful NBA player is not learning the coolest highlight-reel moves. It’s learning how to control your emotions and keep your mind focused on the game, how to play through pain, how to carve out your role on the team and perform it consistently, how to stay cool under pressure and maintain your equanimity after crushing losses or ecstatic wins. In Chicago we had a phrase for this: going from a basketball player to a “professional” NBA player.
For most rookies it takes three or four years to get there. But I told Andrew that we were going to fast-track him because of the key role we envisioned for him on the team. I explained that if he pledged to dedicate himself to the task, I’d pledge to support him all the way. Andrew assured me that I didn’t need to worry about his maturity; he was serious about stepping up. And he stayed true to his word. By the next season he would be the Lakers’ new starting center.
Andrew wasn’t the only player on the team who required this kind of training. We had several young players who needed to be schooled in the basics—including Smush Parker, Luke Walton, Brian Cook, Sasha Vujacic, Von Wafer, Devin Green, and Ronny Turiaf. Instead of a deficit, I saw this as an opportunity to build the new team from the bottom up, with a core group of young players who could learn the system together and provide us with a lot of energy off the bench. Given the team’s makeup, I found myself being less authoritarian and a more patient father figure than usual. This was a team that was crawling its way up from infancy—a new experience for me—and I had to nurture the players’ confidence with care.
One major hurdle to get over with my new team was the lack of consistent scoring options beyond Kobe. I’d originally hoped that Lamar Odom would fill that bill. A former number-four pick overall who averaged 15-plus points a game, Lamar was a graceful six-ten forward with a freewheeling style of play that reminded me of Scottie Pippen. He was great at pulling down rebounds and pushing the ball up court to break down the defense in the open floor. With his size, agility, and playmaking skill, Lamar created matchup problems for a lot of teams, and I thought we might be able to turn him into a strong “point forward” à la Pippen. But Lamar had trouble learning the intricacies of the system and his game often fell apart when we needed him the most. I found that the best way to use Lamar was to give him the freedom to react spontaneously to whatever was happening on the floor. Whenever I tried to box him in to a set role, his spirit seemed to deflate.
There were others whose performance didn’t quite match my expectations. Shortly after I returned, we picked up Kwame Brown in a trade with Washington, hoping to add some muscle to our front line. We knew that Kwame had been a disappointing number-one pick overall for the Wizards, but, at six feet eleven and 270 pounds, he had a good one-on-one game and the strength and quickness to defend the top big men in the league. What we didn’t know until much later was that he didn’t have any confidence in his outside shot. At one point during a game against Detroit, Kobe came over to the bench, laughing. “You might as well take Kwame out of the game, Phil,” he said. “He just told me not to pass him the ball because he might get fouled and have to shoot a free throw.”
Another player who had looked promising at first but lacked mental toughness was Smush Parker. Although on paper veteran Aaron McKie and European newcomer Sasha Vujacic looked stronger than Smush, he outplayed them both in training camp and scored 20 points in three of the first four regular-season games, so we anointed him starting point guard. Smush was a slight, crafty player who was good at slipping through defenses to attack the basket and playing tough, full-court defense. His shooting was erratic, but his spirited play helped energize the offense and get us off to a strong start that season.
But Smush had had a difficult childhood that left him fragile emotionally and limited his ability to bond with others. When he was young, his mother had died of AIDS. If everything was going his way, Smush could be the most energetic player on the floor. But when the pressure mounted, he had a hard time holding himself together. He was a time bomb waiting to explode.
—
Meanwhile Kobe continued to excel. In the first part of the season I told him to let loose since the team had yet to master the system—and he responded by shooting for the history books. Kobe scored 40-plus points in twenty-three games during the regular season and averaged a career-high 35.4 points. The highlight was his 81-point game against the Toronto Raptors in January at the Staples Center. He got ticked off in the third quarter when the Raptors went ahead by 18 points and he erupted for 55 points in the second half to lead the team to a 122–104 victory. Kobe’s 81 was the second-highest total in NBA history, behind Wilt Chamberlain’s legendary 100-point game in 1962. What made Kobe’s performance different was t
he variety of shots he took from all over the floor, including 7 three-pointers—which didn’t exist in the NBA in Wilt’s day. To put Kobe’s performance in perspective, the highest total Michael Jordan ever hit in a game was 69.
Ever since Kobe was a rookie, the question of whether he would become “the next Michael Jordan” had been the subject of endless speculation. Now that Kobe’s game had matured, this no longer seemed like a frivolous question. Even Jordan has said that Kobe is the only player who can be compared to him, and I have to agree. Both men have an extraordinary competitive drive and are virtually impervious to pain. Michael and Kobe have both played some of their best games under crippling conditions—from food poisoning to broken bones—that would sideline lesser mortals for weeks. Their incredible resilience has made the impossible possible, allowing each of them to make game-turning shots with packs of defenders hanging all over them. That said, their styles are different. Michael was more likely to break through his attackers with his power and strength, while Kobe often tries to finesse his way through mass pileups.
As their coach, it’s the differences between them that intrigue me more than their similarities. Michael was stronger, with bigger shoulders and a sturdier frame. He also had large hands that allowed him to control the ball better and make subtle fakes. Kobe is more flexible—hence, his favorite nickname, “Black Mamba.”