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00:00Hi everybody, I'm Brian Kenney, and welcome to ESPN Classics' Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame.
00:05A series that takes a fresh look at sports personalities who are remembered largely for their mistakes, controversial moments, or
00:11questionable decisions.
00:13Our mission is not to further vilify these individuals, but instead to challenge conventional wisdom and re-examine what has
00:19been accepted as fact.
00:20You'll see new evidence, you'll hear new testimony. All you need is an open mind.
00:25In this show, we'll count down the reasons why you can't blame Kobe Bryant for the breakup of the Lakers.
00:30But first, let's take a look back at the collapse of the L.A. dynasty, and why the All-Star
00:34Guard has been accused of dismantling the three-time champions.
00:41They won three championships and went to the finals four out of five years.
00:45Joe Jackson is as good a coach as we've ever had in our sport, and they have two of the
00:49greatest modern-day players I've ever seen in Kobe and Shaq.
00:53To me, Shaq's the most dominant player we've ever had.
00:57Can you pick it?
01:04Kobe's probably the only player I believe out there that really, truly believes he can actually be better or have
01:09a better legacy than Michael Jordan.
01:16After winning three straight NBA championships, the Lakers didn't survive the second round of the 2003 playoffs.
01:23In June, Kobe Bryant put the team on notice that changes may be on the horizon.
01:28Kobe told me these are his words. He will become a free agent at the end of next season.
01:33He will opt out of his contract.
01:36I think that Kobe is a calculated guy.
01:39He was trying to force the Lakers to make a decision.
01:42He's Shaq or Bill Jackson.
01:43He knew what kind of panic that might send through the organization.
01:48Without notifying the Lakers, Bryant traveled to Colorado to undergo knee surgery.
01:52Less than a week after the operation, the Lakers were broadsided by scandal.
01:57Bryant had been accused of sexual assault at a spa in Eagle County.
02:03I'm innocent. I didn't force her to do anything against her will. I'm innocent.
02:11At training camp, the Lakers, who had acquired all-stars Carl Malone and Gary Payton in the offseason, were caught
02:17in the glare of negative publicity.
02:19And the seeds of discontent towards Bryant began to mushroom.
02:23The first day of practice, they weren't tight at the beginning.
02:30That team would have been mentally in a much, much better position.
02:34This group of players was as dysfunctional as a team I've ever seen.
02:38The fact that he had put this distraction on the team was too much for Shaq to think about.
02:43I think there was a lot of anger towards Kobe.
02:46With his trial and Kobe upset at everybody and everybody upset at Kobe, things just got crazier and crazier.
02:53Both Shaq and Gary Payton said to the press, until Kobe's legs are stronger, he should pass the ball more.
03:00And Kobe apparently flipped out when he heard it.
03:03Kobe said, if leaving the Lakers at the end of the season is what I decide to do,
03:08a major reason for that will be Shaq's childlike selfishness and jealousy.
03:12It was Shaq's team. Shaq was the sun, and the other guys would be the planets.
03:20Kobe was never that happy as a planet because he had his own sun potential.
03:25Phil is trying to balance egos here.
03:28He averaged 30 points and been like second or third in MVP voting at the end of 0-3.
03:34So, I think it's safe to say it was his team.
03:40Remember, he got Michael Jordan to play together with Scottie Pippitt and the rest of the Bulls.
03:45But, I think Phil always ran into a brick wall when it came to getting Kobe to do the things
03:50for the team that he wanted him to do.
03:52He didn't respect Phil Jackson as a person.
03:56He respected him as a coach, but not as a person.
03:59Despite the bickering, the talent-laden Lakers got off to a fast start and coasted to the playoffs.
04:04Their 56-26 record was third best in the West, and they beat the Spurs and T-Wolves on the
04:10way to the Finals.
04:11The Lakers are headed back to the NBA Finals once again.
04:15But in the Finals, it was clear that the star-studded Lakers machine was less than the sum of its
04:20parts.
04:21Bryant, in particular, misfired.
04:23Hitting just four of 23 three-point attempts, the man who had surpassed Jordan drew criticism from inside and outside
04:30his dysfunctional team.
04:31Kobe was bringing this team down.
04:34He just ignored Shaq when he was on the floor.
04:36He was just launching shot after shot without a prayer of it going in.
04:41Slap, his 16-footer is way strong.
04:44Kobe, by the way, his 10-footer is an air bomb.
04:46Kobe now 0 for 5.
04:49Sometimes, there was a personal agenda that came in play.
04:53And it was an irritant to the team, and it was an irritant to me, and it was an irritant
04:57to Shaq.
04:57And I know right then, Shaq decided, that's it, I'm done, I'm out of here, because he couldn't play with
05:02such a selfish player.
05:04The Lakers fell in five games to the unselfish Pistons.
05:10And three days later, Phil Jackson was relieved of his duties.
05:15By mutual agreement between the coach and his bosses, Phil Jackson won't be back to lead the Lakers.
05:21Everyone who was around that situation believes that Kobe would have left the Lakers organization if Phil had remained his
05:30coach.
05:31One month later, Shaq was traded to Miami.
05:34I think Jerry Buss drank the Kobe Kool-Aid, so that meant Shaq and Phil were going to go.
05:41It's clear that he has manipulated Buss.
05:45It's dangerous to give a player that kind of control.
05:48Well, Kobe really did orchestrate a lot of this.
05:51It's hard not to blame Kobe.
05:55You've just seen why Bryant is the man everyone likes to blame for the breakup of the Lakers.
06:00Now, before we count down the top five reasons you can't blame Kobe,
06:03here are a few mitigating circumstances that speak in his favor.
06:06We call them the best of the rest.
06:10The Lakers diminished supporting cast.
06:15The supporting players around Shaq and Kobe changed.
06:20We lost Ronnie Harper to retirement.
06:23Brian Shaw got older.
06:25Robert Ory was starting to be on the downhill side of his athletic career.
06:30Fox got injured.
06:31We just got depleted as a team and broken down.
06:36Another best of the rest, the voracious Los Angeles media.
06:40The feud between Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal played like low comedy,
06:44but everyone, it seems, was tuned in.
06:47Arguably, the most talented starting lineup in NBA history is in disarray.
06:52That was as the world turns in professional sports in L.A.
06:56Two of the best players in the game don't like each other.
06:59That Laker family is drama.
07:02We love it.
07:03It's the best soap opera on the planet.
07:05The whole country was tuning in to find out what's going to happen next.
07:09I got Denzel walking up to his chair like, what's really going on?
07:12He said, I don't know, Denzel.
07:13I said, but it's a mess.
07:14I know.
07:15None of us could make up the things that have happened to this team.
07:19The story was kind of like a bucking horse, you know, you're just holding on every day.
07:23When you're in a media market like L.A., when you're the glamour team of the league,
07:28and everything that you do, on the court, off the court, is reported,
07:31that's an exhausting environment in which to live your life on a daily basis.
07:35Ultimately, no team can continue to keep that up.
07:44Welcome back.
07:45You've seen and heard the evidence and a few reasons that didn't make our top five.
07:49Without any further ado, let's begin our countdown.
07:53Reason number five, Jerry West.
07:55His departure left a void in the Lakers.
07:58Jerry West's departure, that was the beginning of the end of the Lakers.
08:02West built the team.
08:04West had a way of commanding respect.
08:06Without him, maybe that organization lost its kind of controlling rudder.
08:12A 14-time All-Star selection in the 1960s and 70s,
08:16West later became the Lakers' executive vice president of basketball operations
08:20and architect of their dynasty in the 1980s.
08:23He commanded respect like no other individual in the organization.
08:28Jerry West was the key to keeping those guys together.
08:32Jerry West was like a father figure to them.
08:34I think Jerry was able to reach Shaquille and Kobe both
08:39in ways that even Phil, I don't think, ever was able to.
08:45After West stepped down in 2000, the relationship between Bryant and O'Neal remained strained
08:50as the Lakers won two more titles to complete the three-peat.
08:54General manager Mitch Kupchak tried to keep the war between his stars from escalating.
08:59Jerry West had to put out these fires time and again.
09:02It's not that Mitch Kupchak is not capable of dealing with these things.
09:06It's just that he didn't have in Shaq's eyes the cachet, the portfolio.
09:10Same thing with Kobe.
09:11The absence of Jerry West factored into Shaquille's paranoia.
09:16Shaquille was desperately looking for someone in the Laker organization that he felt he could trust.
09:22I guarantee you if Jerry West was there, none of this would happen.
09:25Because he's a real general manager.
09:27He would have called us up in all of us and cursed us both out.
09:30And put us both in check.
09:32If you stop that and you stop that, that would have been splashed.
09:36Did that reason grab you?
09:37If not...
09:39Shaq knew when he got there, Jerry West was not somebody who was going to let players walk all over
09:49him.
09:50Because he was a former player.
09:52So he knew how to talk to people.
09:57We've got four more to go.
09:58Here's reason number four.
10:01Carl Malone and Gary Payton.
10:03Their signings failed to bring L.A. a title.
10:06You can blame the whole experiment, bringing the two guys in, for ratcheting up the pressure.
10:11On paper, they were world beaters.
10:13But when you really looked at these two aging guys, you could kind of see that it might not work.
10:19While the Lakers started the 2003-2004 season 18-3 and won the Western Conference title, their success belied a
10:28growing dissatisfaction that had spread beyond the squabbles of Bryant and O'Neal.
10:33Carl Malone readily adapted to Jackson's triangle offense.
10:37But not every player worked within the system.
10:40Gary Payton was the most frustrated player I've seen in a long time.
10:44He couldn't figure out the triangle offense.
10:46Gary Payton was a horrible fit for the Lakers.
10:49Terrible fit.
10:50Very selfish player.
10:51Payton's a hand grenade in high tops.
10:53You just can't ever decide where he's going, what he's doing.
10:58For his part, Malone was a significant factor in the playoffs until he suffered an injury to his left knee
11:03in Game 6 against Minnesota.
11:06Hobbled throughout the finals against Detroit, the mailman couldn't deliver with his usual force.
11:12The straw that broke the camel's back was Carl Malone being injured because Carl Malone seemed like the glue that
11:17kept this soap opera together.
11:19He was probably our best player all the way through the playoffs.
11:23Up until his injury.
11:24Unfortunately, at the end of the season, Gary Payton was healthy and Carl Malone was not.
11:28If it was the other way around, if Carl Malone was in there and Gary Payton was, then the Lakers
11:31might have won the championship and still stay together.
11:33To me, losing Malone to the injury is the biggest single factor that you can blame in the breakup of
11:40the Lakers as we knew them.
11:44Coming up when our countdown continues, how much is Phil Jackson to blame for breaking up the Lakers?
11:50I think the Lakers got tired of Phil's act.
12:00Welcome back.
12:01Did the first two reasons stop and make you think?
12:03If so, here's some more food for thought.
12:05Reason number three.
12:09Shaquille O'Neal.
12:10He had to be the man.
12:14Shaq told me I'm too big to ride in the backseat of anybody else's car.
12:18That's the kind of thing that creates tensions among your great player, your coach, your owner.
12:24And eventually, that kind of thing wears everyone out.
12:27If Shaq's honest with himself, he would take some of the blame.
12:30He, for whatever reason, always felt as if he had to be the guy.
12:39This wasn't the first time Shaq didn't get along with a key teammate.
12:42Although he led the Magic to the 1995 NBA Finals and was the leading scorer in each of his four
12:48seasons in Orlando,
12:49O'Neal was reportedly frustrated with the freelance style of his top guard, Penny Hardaway.
12:56I think a lot of people were saying, well, Penny's the guy on this team, and I think Shaq is
13:00very sensitive to that.
13:01Shaquille has a little bit of an insecurity thing.
13:04Shaq does think he can be treated like number one guy, you know, for him to feel right about it.
13:11When O'Neal signed a seven-year, $121 million contract with the Lakers in 1996,
13:17he didn't know he eventually would be sharing the spotlight with a player who would come to the pros straight
13:22out of high school.
13:23Shaq said, I'm the big brother, Kobe's the little brother, and without really knowing Kobe,
13:30and Kobe wasn't going to be anybody's little brother.
13:32People out there to be the man of the team, but they tell you there's no I in team.
13:35That's a lie. Shaquille is that I in team.
13:38Kobe never deferred to Shaq.
13:40Kobe didn't need taken care of him. Kobe didn't want to be taken care of him.
13:43As far as Shaquille O'Neal saying that this was his team, Kobe said it doesn't matter whose team it
13:48is,
13:48but since it is his team, no more coming into camp fattened out of shape.
13:54Kobe finally said, hey, man, I'm the best player in the league.
13:58Why am I always the little brother?
14:00Making Kobe feel like that was Shaq's biggest deficiency in this whole relationship that finally deteriorated.
14:08We've had our spats, we've had our shared arguments on the floor, you know, for various reasons.
14:14He used to get mad at me for not playing a team in basketball.
14:17I used to get mad because he wasn't in tip-top shape.
14:20It was Shaq's team. Shaq believed that Kobe was kind of the young guy stealing the spotlight from him.
14:28Shaq was not going to put up with that for very long.
14:31You better like me. That's his attitude.
14:34And he doesn't know how to handle it if somebody doesn't like him.
14:37He can't just let it go.
14:38And so he's always harped on Kobe because of that.
14:41And he made Kobe's life tough.
14:43Three reasons down and two to go.
14:45Here's reason number two.
14:48Phil Jackson.
14:49He lost control of the Lakers.
14:53The beating of the drum replaces the heartbeat.
14:56We try to talk about a beat and just play in our games.
15:02Trying to get everybody kind of uniting at the same beat, in the same rhythm, in the same mood.
15:08It doesn't matter how much yoga or Native American chants you bring into the locker room.
15:14At some point, players get tired of your act.
15:18And I think the Lakers got tired of Phil's act.
15:22Phil Jackson talks about the Zen.
15:24What happened to the Zen with Kobe and Shaq?
15:27Didn't the Zen keep these guys together?
15:28No, they're at each other's throats.
15:30I don't think anybody on that team really likes Phil Jackson.
15:33Phil Jackson's a difficult person to understand.
15:36He's condescending.
15:37He's arrogant.
15:38When Jackson arrived in Los Angeles in 1999, he didn't embrace his young star.
15:44Instead, he used Kobe as a lightning rod.
15:46The same way he had used Chicago's Jerry Krause.
15:50When Phil Jackson was in Chicago, he motivated his team with the idea that here's this outsider,
15:56the general manager, Jerry Krause.
15:59And we're going to do everything we can despite Jerry Krause.
16:02And when Phil arrived in L.A., part of what he did was he used Kobe as an outsider to
16:09motivate the rest of the team.
16:10He was the guy that Phil Jackson always identified.
16:13You know, when things would go bad, it was Kobe's fault.
16:16When they'd win, well, it was Shaquille and Phil.
16:18And I think probably that ate away at Kobe a little bit to the point of driving Kobe away.
16:25Phil Jackson has really shaped the public image of Kobe Bryant and was devious in that.
16:32During the 2003-2004 season, when Bryant's legal situation cast a long shadow over the Lakers,
16:40Jackson maintained his distance from his troubled star.
16:43I stood away and apart from Kobe and let him have all the space.
16:47And as a result, he needed more attention.
16:50And I was unappreciated by me.
16:53And I probably played my hand wrong.
16:56According to Jackson, he met with general manager Mitch Kupchak in late January of 2004 and issued an ultimatum.
17:04The essence of what I said was basically that I don't think I can coach Kobe anymore.
17:08I can't reach him.
17:10And if you want me to continue on with this ball club, then change has to be made.
17:15And if you want Kobe on this ball club, then I have to go.
17:18I think Phil was tired of the sandbox fights.
17:21I think he was tired of the drama.
17:23He'd taken that team as far as he could.
17:26I basically made the owner make a choice.
17:28And I knew the choice was, obviously, you're going to stay with the player.
17:32If there's anything that Phil Jackson failed at in Los Angeles, it was this building of a relationship with Kobe
17:41Bryant.
17:42The things that Phil used psychologically to move that team along ultimately eroded the team's nucleus and ended up in
17:50major conflict.
17:54We're down to our final reason.
17:56Have you guessed what it is?
17:58The top reason why you can't blame Kobe Bryant for the breakup of the Lakers is next.
18:09Let's recap the top five reasons why Kobe Bryant is not to blame for breaking up since five through two.
18:15Now, the number one reason why you can't fault Kobe.
18:19Jerry Buss.
18:21It was the Lakers owner who chose form over substance.
18:26When Jerry Buss saw Kobe Bryant go up and down the court, he saw Magic Johnson and Byron Scott in
18:32the 1980s.
18:33He saw Showtime revisited.
18:39Jerry Buss, he said he wanted a faster, more dynamic team.
18:43He didn't want the Rolls Royce, he wanted the Maserati.
18:48He had a coach who was not really a run-and-gun coach.
18:51He certainly had a center who wasn't going to run up and down the court.
18:54And he had a guy in Kobe who could do all that.
18:58Jerry Buss started his reorganization by dismissing the coach who had brought him three titles.
19:04When they got rid of the field without calling me, I knew things were about to start going down.
19:10Except this ain't something I want to be a part of.
19:12In the midst of the turmoil, O'Neal demanded an extension to his $29 million-a-year contract.
19:19Buss didn't budge, and Shaq was traded to Miami.
19:23It's done.
19:24Shaq's gone, and L.A. belongs to Kobe.
19:27Jerry Buss had a big problem with paying Shaquille that much money.
19:30It was very apparent, actually, that he was declining.
19:33You know, he was not what he had been.
19:35That's a franchise decision done, in my opinion, for the best health of the franchise.
19:42I think Shaq took it more personally than it was intended.
19:46I don't take nothing personal, man.
19:47I figured they would get rid of me first.
19:49Because they figured that I was a problem to him.
19:52And Kobe's their guy.
19:54He's the future.
19:55Whatever that means.
19:57And I understood that.
19:58Everything broke out about the trade.
20:01The people blaming me for it.
20:03You know, Shaq's leaving.
20:04He's not happy there, so Kobe must have ran him out.
20:07It's not true.
20:07I said, Kobe, I don't want...
20:11Kobe's 25.
20:13He's 25 at the end of the 2-0 in the 4th season.
20:17Shaq's 32.
20:19So one guy has three years left.
20:22One guy has 10.
20:24Who you keep?
20:30Any kind of blame to come on your shoulders.
20:34I just want to tell you what I've decided to do
20:39and what kind of team I want to have.
20:42When Jerry Buss traded Shaquille,
20:44he had no commitment from Kobe whatsoever that he was coming back.
20:48And they were terrified for two weeks.
20:51Having opted out of the last year on his contract,
20:53Bryant declared himself a free agent
20:55and flirted with the idea of joining the Clippers.
20:58But Buss was determined to keep his 25-year-old all-star guard.
21:02Seven weeks before the sexual assault charges against Bryant were dropped,
21:07he re-signed with the Lakers for seven years
21:09and $136 million.
21:14I'm happy to be back.
21:15I'm happy to be playing for the Lakers.
21:18I'd love to play a game
21:20with somebody knowledgeable about basketball,
21:23put them in the driver's seat,
21:25and say, what would you do in this circumstance?
21:28I'm pretty sure they would have done exactly what I did.
21:30Jerry Buss basically said,
21:33Kobe Bryant's our most important asset.
21:35That's the guy we have to keep happy.
21:37And the way to keep Kobe happy
21:39is if Phil is gone and if Shaq is gone.
21:43I think the person you have to blame
21:45for the breakup of the Lakers is Jerry Buss.
21:50Well, there you have it,
21:51the top five reasons you can't blame Kobe Bryant
21:53for the breakup of the Lakers.
21:55We can't always change your mindset,
21:56but at least we may have made you think about it
21:58in a different light.
21:59I'm Brian Kenney.
22:00Thanks for joining us.
22:01Thanks for joining us.
22:02Thanks for listening.
22:03Bye.
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