01
3
2000–2002
Los Angeles
Lakers
The Three-Peat
Three titles, two men, and one unanswered question
3
Titles
2
Years
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There is one thing people forget about Shaquille O'Neal: the NBA legislated against him.
Not against his team, not against a tactic. Against one man. When a player standing seven-foot-one and weighing 325 pounds sets up ten feet from the rim, no legal defensive answer exists. So the league invented others. He was sent to the free-throw line by being deliberately grabbed. Zone defense was legalised in 2001, after decades of prohibition, partly because somebody had to be able to put three bodies in front of him.
None of it was enough.
Between 2000 and 2002 the Lakers won three consecutive titles. In 2001 they went through the playoffs at fifteen wins and a single defeat, the most crushing campaign of the modern era. They were not winning games so much as passing straight through them.
But that is not the story of this team.
The story of this team is that it housed two men who wanted the same thing and could not bear to share it. Shaq was the centre of gravity, literally. Kobe Bryant was twenty-one, carried a self-belief that nothing dented, and was privately certain his turn had already come. Phil Jackson had won six titles in Chicago by teaching one genius to trust his teammates. In Los Angeles he had to teach two geniuses to tolerate each other.
It held for three years.
Three years in which the tension was not a flaw in the system: it was the engine. Shaq played harder because Kobe pushed him. Kobe worked more than anyone because he refused to be second. Each wanted to prove the team was his, and the rest of the league paid the bill.
Then the same forces that had made them unbeatable pulled them apart. Shaq left for Miami in 2004. Kobe stayed, and waited four years to see the Finals again.
The Bulls stopped because Jordan left. The Lakers stopped because they could no longer stand in the same room.
Context
The era
Los Angeles in the early 2000s was the precise point where basketball and entertainment stopped being two separate industries.
The Staples Center had opened in 1999, brand new, designed to be looked at as much as to hold a crowd. The front row was a Hollywood directory. Jack Nicholson had his seat there the way people keep a box at the opera. Attending a Lakers game was as much a public appearance as a sporting event.
The contrast with the rest of the country was total. While Cleveland counted its closed factories, Los Angeles sold glamour to a sold-out house. Both cities wanted the same thing — a team that wins — but they did not experience it remotely the same way.
This was also an NBA short of a face. Jordan had retired in 1998, the league was looking for his successor and hesitating between two men from the same locker room. Magazines had to pick a cover. Nike had to pick a campaign. The "Shaq or Kobe" argument was not merely an internal quarrel, it was the question American basketball was asking itself.
And then there was Chick Hearn, the voice of the Lakers since 1965, calling these games in his eighties with the vocabulary he had invented himself. He died in August 2002, a few weeks after the third title. An era closed with him, almost to the day that the team's own era closed too.
The players
The architects
The players who defined this era.
02
Kobe Bryant
03
Derek Fisher
Philosophy
The system
Phil Jackson's triangle again, but reorganised around the low post: everything starts with Shaq, the defense collapses, the ball comes back out to the shooters. Kobe was the release valve in isolation whenever the system stalled. Behind it all, Shaq's mere presence in the paint deterred half the drives the opposition wanted to take.
A brand-new Staples Center, Jack Nicholson in the front row, purple and gold, Chick Hearn's voice on the radio
Key moments
The defining games
The moments that sealed the legacy.