Lifestyle > Sports & Entertainment
Article on Phil Jackson's "The Last Season" (Shocking stuff)
Now_Im_Not_Banned:
--- Quote from: jeromechickenbone on October 13, 2004, 04:18:51 PM ---
--- Quote from: Now_I_Know on October 13, 2004, 09:59:36 AM ---"This is an excerpt from Phil Jackson's book "Mindgames" by Roland Lazenby published in 2001.
Still, Jackson's initial disappointment over not getting Pippen led him to forecast a 5-5 start for his team in November. And that came before an October 13 injury forced Bryant to miss the first 15 games on the schedule. Yet even a setback such as Bryant's broken wrist proved to be a blessing. It allowed the coaches to mold the team indentity, then to add Bryant's frenetic energy to the equation in December, like some sort of super-octane fuel.
It would also allow time for the rift between Bryant and O'Neal to begin healing. On that issue, Jackson wasted little time. "I'm going to stop some of the gossiping, stop some of the rumormongering among the personnel here," he promised that first day.
At the time, Jackson and his coaches didn't realize just how deep a divide they faced. After the season, Winter would confide that he was shocked by the level of hatred O'Neal expressed for Bryant when the coaches first arrived on the scene. "There was alot of hatred in his heart," Winter said, adding that O'Neal didn't hesitate to vent his feelings in team meetings. "He was saying really hateful things," Winter explained. "Kobe just took it and kept going."
O'Neal's main message to anyone who would listen, including management, was that the team could not win a championship with Bryant. West had been strong in pushing aside O'Neal's desire to remove Bryant from the team, but there were signs that management had heard the message so often that they, too, entertained doubts. During the offseason, former O'Neal teammate Penny Hardaway had contacted O'Neal about joining the Lakers. The center jumped at the opportunity and phoned management. The implied message was that Bryant should be traded, but management declined that move.
During the season, as the coaches worked to heal the rift between the players, Winter explained that it had been clear that if the coaches' efforts didn't work that "a move would have to be made if they can't play together." The team wasn't about to trade the massive O'Neal, which meant that Bryant would have to go. Like West, though, the coaching staff saw Bryant as a Jordan-like player. His hands were smaller than Jordan's, but the athletic ability, the intelligence, the desire, were prodigious. What wasn't clear was whether Bryant would grow to possess the alpha male nature that made Jordan so dominant in his late twenties. Bryant was still so young, it was hard to evaluate him for that. He certainly possessed the work ethic and drive.
But Jackson put off the temptation to form a close relationship with Bryant. The coach correctly read that O'Neal's nature craved such a relationship, and Jackson turned just about all of his undivided attention to his relationship with O'Neal. The coach would later explain that the center did not have the same inquisitiveness as Jordan, and the conversations he had with O'Neal were not as expansive. Still, they spent much time talking. Early in the season, Bryant would point out that he had yet to sit down for an in-depth conversation with Jackson. Bryant kept expecting that conversation to occur. But it never would. Jackson kept his time for O'Neal. Some of the coaching staff pointed out that Bryant could have approached the coach about such a talk, but the young guard had such a strong sense of team issues that he seemed happy to let Jackson focus his efforts on soothing the center's harsh feelings.
For much of the healing between the center and the guard, Jackson and Winter relied on their triangle. The main idea was that because the offense was so structured, it would make the relationship between O'Neal and Bryant smoother on the court. Still, the coaches found there was so much residual anger on the part of O'Neal and other veterans against Bryant that Jackson had to spend months counseling O'Neal on how to get over it. The danger, said Winter, was that O'Neal seemed to influence the entire team against Bryant. So he and Jackson worked regularly on changing that attitude. "The coaches voiced to us that they weren't seeing the same things we were seeing when they watched film and when they watched what was going on," Derek Fisher explained. "They didn't see the same selfishness or one-on-one play that we saw. What I tried to tell some of the other guys is that this is our fourth year now- me, Shaq, Robert, Rick, Travis- so we still had issues that we had dealt with before this year."
And those issues were still cooking on the team agenda, Fisher said. "It was kind of similar to a relationship between a man and a woman where you get upset with all of these things from the past that come up. That's really where alot of this stuff stemmed from. The coaches saw that alot of this stuff would come in due time. But we were so impatient because we felt we had dealt with it before." For a time, it seemed that no matter what Bryant did, O'Neal and other teammates wanted to find fault with it. Winter revealed that he finally put together a videotape to prove to O'Neal that Bryant was doing just what he was supposed to do. "I think Kobe is bending over backwards to get the ball in to Shaq," Winter would confide as the season progressed. "If there's a problem there- and I think we'll work it out- it's that I don't think Shaq appreciates what Kobe is trying to do to help his game."
And so it became easy for the coaches to take Bryant's early injury as a blessing. The guard's absence allowed the team's entire focus to fall upon O'Neal, which worked nicely into Jackson's plans. He had named O'Neal capatain and spent considerable time talking through a new approach to the game. Jackson wanted more leadership, conditioning, and defense out of O'Neal. As Winter explained, Jackson knew that O'Neal was motivated by scoring points, so he gave the ceneter more scoring opportunities as long as he fulfilled the rest of his obligations. Jackson also regularly called O'Neal's hand if hew failed to do the right thing."
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Kobe's still a bitch :nahnah:
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Just showing that there's 2 sides to every story...You don't judge a man by what you read on him.
Javier:
How does that excerpt from a book that was out in 2001 relate to Phil's comments about the current off-season?
mikeOG:
--- Quote ---But another incident showed Jackson how much of the battle was his own doing. In March, Bryant was late for a bus to the airport, by Jackson's reckoning. Bryant insisted he was on time and Jackson should "get with the rest of the world" and synchronize his watch. Jackson later checked with a trainer and discovered that Bryant was right; Jackson's watch was three minutes fast.
"The incident illustrated to me how conditioned I am to find fault with this kid, after everything I've gone through with him," Jackson wrote. "I suppose the anger is deeper than I imagined."
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even phil acknowledges he was picking on kobe from time to time and then this from one of the creators of the triangle and his own assistant coach text winter:
Early in the season, after the Lakers had beaten the Pistons, Jackson wrote that Detroit was not a good team. But in June, the two teams were in the N.B.A. finals. In a video session after the Pistons and Lakers had split the first two games of the series, the Lakers assistant coach Tex Winter offered a withering assessment of O'Neal's defense against the screen roll. When his career is over, Winter said angrily, he vowed to expose O'Neal as "overrated."
Jackson defended O'Neal, but Winter excoriated his footwork and failure to make free throws. When Jackson raised O'Neal's high field-goal percentage as a positive, Winter shot back that they were "all dunks." When the players joined the video review, Winter and O'Neal had a confrontation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/13/sports/basketball/14jackson.html?oref=login&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1097719664-gtk34UYpD5Ok/71bvnGNNw
just shows how one sided phil was and even if kobe is a ass..wtf does that have to do with playing basketball? jordan was hated by many for the same reason..got into fights with teamates, was stubborn etc..shaq had 3 enemy's in 3 places he's been (penny, kobe, eddie jones) but the media kept jordans stuff on the low-low cause to them he was an angel..and we laker fans shouldnt really give a fuck what other fans think about kobe, if 3-4 years down the road the lakers are title contenders its all good for us..winning is what basketball is and should be about for the fans, not judging the players characters (most kobe haters are lovin this tho..they just couldnt wait for an opportunity like this to bash on him) Once again this is phil's book and will be one-sided, he loooved shaq soo much he was often reminded by his assistant coaches how much of a lazy azz he was..
on a side note: shaq already has a hamstring pull after playing 1 preseason game ;D
Now_Im_Not_Banned:
--- Quote from: / Javier / on October 14, 2004, 01:50:30 PM ---How does that excerpt from a book that was out in 2001 relate to Phil's comments about the current off-season?
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It shows that both players have character flaws. Shit, everyone does...And have you ever heard that saying "it takes two to tango"?...Also, read what mikeOG wrote...PeACe
Now_Im_Not_Banned:
It's quite obvious, if Tex Winter were to write a book, he'd bash the shit out of Shaq in the worst way, and if Phil Jackson were to write a book, he'd bash the shit out of Kobe in the worst way...Phil wrote a book and Tex didn't...How you can stop cheering for a team because of this seems pretty retarded/sad to me...Everyone has character flaws: Shaq, Kobe, Phil, EVERYONE!...Kobe is not perfect, neither is Shaq...You can't just betray a whole franchise because of Phil's comments...You can read the excerpt Javier posted and be like "Fuck Kobe!", or you can read the excerpt I posted and be like "Fuck Shaq!"...I don't pick sides, but I'm a true Laker fan, and I rather be like "Fuck Shaq"...Ride for your team, homie.
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