Raja Bell, who played with Shaquille O'Neal on the Phoenix Suns, says Shaq used to use secret signals on the Los Angeles Lakers so his teammates wouldn't pass the ball to Kobe Bryant.
Shaq and Kobe won three titles together on the Lakers, but as we all know, they didn't have the best relationship.
The dynamic duo split up after the 2004 season ended when the Lakers traded O'Neal to the Miami Heat. The Diesel won a title with Dwyane Wade in Miami, while Bryant won two more titles with the Lakers with Pau Gasol.
“Shaq told me a story. We had a kid named Gordon Giricek on our Suns team, he had gotten there, and Gordon would go in the game, and Gordon was about his buckets,” Bell said, via CBS Sports. “So Gordon would get in, and no matter what we were doing, no matter what the flow or the chemistry was, Gordon would be just, you know, shooting the ball. Gordon was my guy, I played with him in Utah.
“But Shaq started saying ‘hey guys, this is the symbol' (twitches thumbs downward) ‘when I give you this, Gordon doesn't get the ball anymore.' And I'm like ‘dude what is the background on that, where'd you come up with that?' And he was like ‘when Kobe was young, he would be going in and just trying to get 'em, so the rest of us had a universal kind of code that if we looked at each other and went (gives signal) then that meant Kobe didn't get the ball anymore.' “
Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant are on good terms now. The Lakers legends had a playful back and forth on Twitter recently, but Bryant wanted everyone to know there was no beef between the two Hall of Famers.
This is a pretty fascinating story. It sheds some light on just how tenacious the relationship between Shaq and Kobe was back in the day.
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