Former Los Angeles Lakers forward AC Green still vividly remembers how Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal realized that they were meant for something historic.
In the post-Michael Jordan era, the Lakers were among the NBA teams touted to win the championship.
At the time, the team already got a dominant big man in Shaquille O’Neal and a versatile scorer in the late Kobe Bryant. Ideally, the Lakers should’ve been easily one of the best teams in the league. However, the pair did not see each other eye-to-eye.
Recounting what happened next, ex-Laker AC Green said that the animosity between Bryant and O’Neal soon took a toll on the Lakers inside the basketball court.
During the 1999-2000 NBA season, the Lakers were losing a lot of games and Green said coach Phil Jackson had to call a meeting.
In the middle of Jackson’s film session talk, Green remembered asking the coaching staff to leave the players inside the room for a minute. A few moments later, things got intense between the two Lakers superstars but after that, the Kobe-Shaq dynasty began.
“We got the Shaq group, the Kobe group, and the veteran guys who have already won a championship. We’re like in the middle, looking at one another like, ‘You know what we gotta do, right?,’ Green said on “Off The Dribble: The Byron Scott Podcast.”
“Next thing you know, we’re like, ‘Coaches, can you all leave the room for a minute?’ Let’s just say some choice words were exchanged,” he continued. “Some voices got high. Some furniture got moved. The point got across and the mission got on. Then we went on another winning streak, and they finally started to see that this is how you win, and this is how you actually start to look out after one another.”
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