According to Shaquille O’Neal, back when he was teammates with Kobe Bryant on the Los Angeles Lakers, he would motivate Bryant by aggravating him.
O’Neal apparently used to bring up players like Michael Jordan and LeBron James in order to get under Bryant’s skin.
“I used to say things to make him mad on purpose because I knew that’s when he’d play his best,” O’Neal shared. “I’d tell him things like, ‘You’re not Michael Jordan,’ or, ‘They got this kid LeBron [James] in Cleveland who’s better than you.’”
O’Neal’s strategy of making Bryant mad in order to get the best out of him was seemingly a success based on the amount of winning the pair did together.
Bryant and O’Neal made up one of the most successful duos in the history of the league, along with other iconic pairs like Jordan and Scottie Pippen, Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and more.
The two played alongside each other on the Lakers from the 1996-97 season through the 2003-04 campaign, and during that time, Los Angeles enjoyed a massive amount of collective success.
Across those eight seasons, the Lakers won 50 games or more seven times. The one time with Bryant and O’Neal that Los Angeles didn’t reach the 50-win mark came during the truncated 1998-99 campaign, when the team finished the regular season with a record of 31-19.
Additionally, the Lakers reached the playoffs in every one of those years and never lost in the opening round of the playoffs with Bryant and O’Neal leading the way. They did lose in the second round of the playoffs on three occasions, however.
A few second-round exits aside, Los Angeles was commonly one of the last teams standing in the playoffs during the Bryant and O’Neal era. The duo helped the Lakers reach five Western Conference Finals and four NBA Finals.
Most notably, O’Neal, Bryant and the Lakers won three consecutive titles from 2000 through 2002. Only a handful of NBA teams have ever won three championships in a row, and no team hasn’t accomplished that feat since the Lakers.
Lakers fans should be happy that O’Neal was seemingly hard on Bryant, as nobody knows if the two would have put together a dynasty in Los Angeles if he weren’t.
