Lakers: Several Pacers Still Bitter About Shaquille O'Neal And Kobe Bryant's First Championship
Episode six of Hulu's very watchable new Jeanie Buss-produced, Antoine Fuqua-directed docuseries "Legacy: The True Story of the L.A. Lakers" debuted last week, and we're still hung up on some of its best moments. Especially the climactic part of the episode, which covers the 2000 NBA Finals.
The new installment of the show details the dawn of the Shaqobe era in L.A., picking up the baton where episode five left off: during the preseason, after the dynamic duo of Hall of Fame center Shaquille O'Neal and Hall of Fame shooting guard Kobe Bryant arrived during one of the most important summers in L.A. team president Jerry West's career as an executive. No small feat, considering the Logo won eight titles in a front office capacity!
As "Legacy" details, O'Neal advocated for adding the best coach in the world following a second-round flameout in the 1999 playoffs against the Tim Duncan, David Robinson and the rest of eventual-champion San Antonio Spurs. After Phil Jackson put Shaq through his paces during an eventful meeting in Jackson's offseason estate in Montana, the head coach agreed to sign on, telling the club he expected to win multiple championships with his Shaq-Kobe core.
And indeed he did.
The episode concludes with these Lakers legends winning their first title together following a 67-15 season and Shaq's first-ever MVP award. L.A. secured its championship against the Indiana Pacers in six games, following a hard-fought Western Conference Finals game seven comeback, after the Portland Trail Blazers were leading by 15 points in the fourth quarter.
"The Pacers -- Reggie Miller, Jalen Rose, Rik Smits -- man we knew we [were] gonna dust them off. They were weak," Lakers mega-fan Snoop Dogg joked.
Outside of two blowouts (a 104-87 Game 1 Lakers win and a 120-87 Game 5 Pacers shellacking), the series was fairly even and chippy. The other four games were all determined by single digits, decided by a margin of 7.7 points a night. Even today, the memory of that series loss still haunts several Pacers.
As Bryant later admitted during his TNT sit-down with O'Neal, the Lakers shooting guard had been anticipating and preparing for this series all season.
"I was filming some show at UCLA the summer before [the 2000 NBA Finals], and Reggie Miller was up there," Bryant told O'Neal. "I said, ‘OK, they’ve got a really good team. We might see these guys.’ And I said, ‘Let’s play one-on-one.’ And we played one-on-one, and I proceeded to really measure him. See what he liked to do defensively, see where he moves, see where he was weak at and what I could exploit. So when that happened and the Finals were here, I knew what I had and knew what I could take. I knew what he would give me."
That's some 4D chess right there.
Veteran sharpshooter Miller, who lived in L.A. during the offseason during his playing years (and lives here now as a TNT broadcaster), told Dan Patrick that he later regretted giving Bryant advice, though he recalled an earlier encounter than the one Bryant mentioned in the O'Neal interview. Whether Miller's remembered tutorial happened during the 1999 UCLA commercial shoot or during a different moment entirely is unclear.
Timing questions aside, Miller reflected on how he came to regret his generosity in the NBA Finals. "Three years later in the NBA Finals, that same move that I was showing him in my step back, he hit in [Game 4] after Shaq fouled out. As he's running down the court, [he] pats me on the butt and says, 'You never should've showed me that move.'"
Bryant sprained his ankle after landing on then-Pacers small forward Jalen Rose's foot while launching a jumper early in Game 2. He wound up missing most of that contest and all of Game 3 with the injury. In a recent conversation with his ESPN colleague Jorge Sedano, Rose recalled his struggles trying to contain Bryant during the series.
"I realized that Reggie [Miller], Mark [Jackson], [Chris] Mullin, me, Travis [Best] -- we can't guard him," Rose said. "He went up for a jump shot, and I purposely acted like I was contesting the shot and made him come down on my foot... I didn't want him to clearly break his ankle, but in my mind it'd be great if it made him miss these next three games... In true Kobe fashion, this dude only missed one game." Rose later acknowledged that he regrets the decision to deliberately injure Bryant now.
Bryant roared back with a vengeance for Game 4, scoring 28 points on 14-of-27 shooting, plus five assists, four rebounds, two blocks and a steal. Bryant's performance helping the Lakers put away the Pacers in overtime after O'Neal had fouled out in the fourth quarter. Rose discussed Bryant's multi-tiered effort to strive for excellence. "It became a signature moment when he returned early in his career," Rose mentioned. "And there's the footage of Kobe Bryant making a couple of jump shots. And he does the point to the ground, 'get down to lay down' motion that a lot of people see LeBron James doing now."
"It was crazy because he was fighting against Michael Jordan's legacy, he was fighting against his teammates, and then he was fighting against the opponent," Rose continued. "So when that shot went in, he wasn't even talking trash to the Pacers, that was for his bench."
"The toughest thing for us was in Game 4," then-Pacers head coach Larry Bird conceded in current interview footage for the documentary. "There's always one play that [makes] you go, 'That's the one that killed us.' It was that tip-in from Kobe." As a refresher: the Lakers were leading the series 2-1 and this critical Game 4 by just a point, 118-117, with 5.9 seconds remaining during the first overtime period. Brian Shaw missed a running one-handed floater, so Bryant leapt up beneath the bucket to tip in a put-back. That essentially sealed the game for L.A. (which would win the contest 120-118), bringing the Lakers to a virtually insurmountable 3-1 series lead in the Finals.
During an interview with Fox Sports' Shannon Sharpe, point guard Mark Jackson discussed the series. "We should've won," Jackson said. "It was a 2-3-2 [series, meaning L.A. hosted the first two games, Indiana hosted Games 3-5, and the series shifted to L.A. for the final two games], so we won Game 3, and we lost Game 4 in overtime. Shaq fouls out, and the late great Kobe Bryant singlehandedly takes over the game in the fourth quarter and overtime... We did everything we could. I can remember saying to Reggie Miller, because [Bryant] hit a couple of shots, I'm like, 'Let me get him.' ...I'm not thinking I'm gonna stop him, [instead] I'm gonna hammer him one good time and send a message and get him out of his rhythm. I hammered him, 'Nice,' basket, and-one, I'm like, 'Reg, you got him. It ain't working.'... We had the depth and the versatility, at the end of the day, they had two dudes [who were] unstoppable. You look at the numbers that Shaquille O'Neal [had] in the Finals. It was crazy."
The then-27-year-old O'Neal won Finals MVP, thanks to commanding averages of 38 points, 16.7 rebounds, 2.7 blocks, 2.3 assists, and one steal across 45.7 minutes in the series.
Indiana responded with the aforementioned Game 5 blowout victory, but, as you can see in the postgame interview clip with O'Neal shown in the "Legacy" doc, the Lakers did not appear phased. "Now uno mas to go," a sweaty Big Diesel noted.
And that was all it took.
"You know, to reach this pinnacle again, after going all the way down, it's just a fantastic feeling, I can tell you," a champagne-soaked Jerry Buss raved in interview footage from that night, as shown in "Legacy."
"I was a little kid, but I'd heard so many stories about how the Lakers had won so many championships in the '80s," reflected a modern-day Jesse Buss during his interview for the show. "And being there with my father, to see him at his peak happiness, it made it that much more special."
Watch the entirety of Bryant's Game 4 masterpiece here:
