Shaquille O'Neal Retires: Is the Kobe Bryant-O'Neal Feud Finally Over?
1) If Shaq has a home gym, why on earth did he show up to training camp overweight every season?
2) Will Shaq’s retirement finally end the Shaq-Kobe feud?
The Shaq-Kobe feud has lingered for years. 119 articles!
Despite the Hollywood drama between Shaq and Kobe, the two played together well enough to lead the Los Angeles Lakers to three consecutive championships from 2000-2002.
Shaq was traded to Miami, Kobe stayed in LA and the Lakers wallowed in mediocrity for the next several years.
Would the Lakers have beaten the Pistons if Kobe and Shaq were not having alpha-dog battles? At the time of the incident, most blamed Kobe for the breakup. Years later, after watching Shaq leave Miami
While journalists and commentators around the country reveled in the Shaq-Kobe feud, nothing good ever came of it for the Lakers. The
Trail Blazers
. The Shaq-Kobe years in Los Angeles were great, but they could have been so much greater.
Let us all hope the Big Fella’s retirement ends the Shaq and Kobe feud once and for all.
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Shaq & Kobe: Who's the better person?
Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant lost Game 1 of the 2001 NBA Finals in overtime, but they won every one of the other 15 games they played together as Lakers that postseason.
On consecutive days, Kobe got a new coach and Shaq retired.
Who's the better player? It's a somewhat reasonable debate, even though there is an obvious answer considering Bryant has one NBA MVP trophy to match O'Neal's one, leads in titles by a 5-4 score and already has more playoff points than O'Neal. (Bryant will pass O'Neal in career regular-season scoring next season with another 30 games or so.)
Life with Shaq was loud, proud and in a crowd.
Phil Jackson scheduled Lakers practices with O'Neal's road-city party hangovers in mind. O'Neal would pick up the PR guy and dump him in the trashcan. That portrayal is a stretch, but for all the accurate descriptions of Bryant as self-absorbed, O'Neal was too. O'Neal used to call Jackson his white father and wrote in his 2000 autobiography: "I would never play for Pat Riley." Jackson smiled that thin smile when asked one day in Miami about O'Neal having become all snuggly with Riley at Jackson's expense.
Jackson offered a remark for the way O'Neal operates - "Love the one you're with" - a summation that would work well at O'Neal's roast ... or in his psychologist's office.
Unlike Bryant, Jackson didn't say whether O'Neal paid any of the ones he loved $1 million to keep quiet.
But even more than Jackson, the most mature of Shaq and Kobe's teammates managed to make it work separately. One of the questions contrasted Bryant living for silencing road arenas and O'Neal loving to hear home cheers.
The guy with the most acquaintances is never the guy with the best friends.
Shaq is leaving the NBA.