When All Was Said and Done, Fundamentals Set Them Apart

Shaquille O’Neal did not all of a sudden find spiritual peace on a mountaintop or soak his hands in magic waters.

Kobe Bryant did not lower his goals or throttle back his impulsive race to greatness.

The power-forward spot did not get filled by a young player or a big player, but by an old player and a skinny player.

Glen Rice did not find a comfortable role or find a new team.

See? What was most meaningful and powerful about the Lakers’ gallop to the 2000 NBA championship wasn’t what was different . . . it was what was the same about this team.

It wasn’t about drastic changes, but about the hammer-and-nail fundamentals--defense across the floor, simple, sound offensive movement and a stubborn nose for rebounding.

It was about using most of the same players in new and dramatically successful ways.

It was about Coach Phil Jackson exerting so much confidence and will that his players believed anything he wanted them to.

And it was about winning moments, instances that separated this Laker season from the ones immediately before it, including these 10 freeze-frame slices of 67 regular-season victories and 15 postseason wins, over nine months, a thousand stories and one golden trophy.

1. TITLE SEQUENCE

Four years is not forever, but for presidents and for NBA superstars, it is about all the time you get.

With the NBA conjuring new stars by the basketful every season (Penny Hardaway! Dirk Nowitzki! Keith Van Horn!), it’s easy to see O’Neal’s time in L.A. as an eternity--since the summer of 1996, he had been expected to get the Lakers to a championship, and he had not done it.

Each time the Lakers fell short in the playoffs, O’Neal solemnly addressed the same questions about his heart and work ethic, solemnly went back to an off-season of frustration, and tried again.

So that is what leaked, then poured out of him Monday night, in tears and in every move he made on that stage in the middle of Staples Center, sandwiched among his mother and Jackson and his teammates.

Was he changed by the moment? No, he was the same Shaq--emotional, unpredictable, undeniable, and this time (and maybe for all time) untouchable.

2. ROLLING A SEVEN

Not days, but months before the ultimate showdown with the Portland Trail Blazers, Jackson saw Scottie Pippen, his old Chicago Bull favorite, move from the Houston Rockets to the Trail Blazers (as the Lakers stood pat) and fitfully warned his associates:

Pippen, he said, might end up leading the Trail Blazers over the Lakers in a Game 7.

And what happened? In a cosmic Game 7 of an epic Western Conference final series, Pippen jumped inside the Lakers’ triangle offense, dared any Laker to try to stop him, and all but personally slammed the door shut on the Lakers’ championship drive.

Then, either by an enormous stroke of good fortune, or because of a tremendous surge of brilliance, or because of a desolate Portland collapse--or more probably, a large combination of all three--the Trail Blazers froze, missed 13 consecutive shots in the fourth quarter, blew a 15-point lead, and the Lakers went racing past them, into the NBA finals.

3. OVERTIME, OVER THE HUMP

You know the situation: Bryant has a sprained ankle that forced him out of a Game 3 loss at Indianapolis, but he is playing in a back-and-forth Game 4; O’Neal is in foul trouble, then fouls out in overtime, with the series swaying in the balance--a Laker loss would tie the finals, 2-2.

And Bryant, in the middle of his first trip to the NBA finals, assumes command.

“He came over to me and said, ‘In this situation, Jordan wouldn’t let his team lose,’ ” Brian Shaw said of Bryant. “ ‘So why should I let mine?’ He had that look in his eye.”

Four baskets and eight points later, including a remarkable reverse tip-in with less than 10 seconds to play in overtime that proved to be the winning margin, and Bryant’s performance was etched across the memory of anyone who saw it.

4. SHAQ, 9 FOR 9 FROM LINE

“I had to take him out early so he could keep that stat sheet,” Jackson said after Game 4 of the Portland series was over, when O’Neal was finished grinning at the free-throw line and floating on top of the world.

“We told him, put that on a wall. Frame that one.”

Why was O’Neal smiling?

“Because I felt like Pete Maravich,” O’Neal said of his greatest playoff free-throw performance, which, it might be added, provided the finishing kick in a key road victory.

“My only problem is I’ve been real inconsistent at the line. . . . I think if I could develop some consistency, I could become a great player in this league one day.”

5. HARPER MADE THE SHOT!

It was not quite John Havlicek stealing the ball, or Larry Bird stealing the pass, but Ron Harper’s slingshot 19-foot swish with 29.9 seconds to play in Game 3 at Portland seemed almost as significant.

The Trail Blazers hadn’t been guarding Harper or A.C. Green all series, and it especially nettled Harper, since it was his friend Pippen who was freelancing away from him all over the floor, especially into O’Neal’s lap.

When Bryant dribbled, turned his back, and then whipped a pass across the court to Harper, alone, it was the answer to Harper’s plea.

“The only thing I told the guys was, ‘My man is not guarding me,’ ” Harper said. “He hasn’t guarded me the first two games and he’s not doing it now.

“I said, ‘I’m going to find a nice spot there for a shot.’ ”

6. FEAR AND LOBBING IN SEATTLE

Bryant had a favorite moment of his own this season: Down by 19 in the third quarter at Seattle in early January and looking horrible--especially against former Laker Ruben Patterson, who had mocked Bryant in the off-season--the Lakers didn’t just come back, they incinerated the SuperSonics.

That, Bryant said later, was when he first saw another team shake at the sight of the Lakers.

During the run that tied the score, before the Lakers zoomed on by, the Lakers outscored Seattle, 21-2, in the blink of an eye.

“We started playing, and playing, and you could see fear in their eyes as we were coming back,” Bryant said. “And John Salley was like, ‘You know what, this is going to be a championship team.’

“We knew we had the makings to be a champion. . . . We knew we had something there. In the past, we never saw that, it never happened. Teams never feared us.”

7. THE SAGE

Someone needed to speak to the media, twice, when other Laker players were not required to and did not want to.

So it was Harper who sat before the cameras and the tape recorders the day after the Lakers lost their second consecutive game at Sacramento, sliding stunningly into a decisive first-round Game 5 with the Kings.

“I don’t think we lost three games straight [in the regular season]. . . . Well, then, what’s the problem?” Harper said. “We haven’t lost three games all season long, ain’t no need for us to think we’re going to lose this game.”

Then again, after getting demolished at Phoenix in Game 4 of that second-round Western Conference series, the day before Game 5, it was Harper who wandered out to the media, and Harper who delivered the bite.

“We’re going to win tomorrow’s game,” he said, “no doubt in my mind. . . . I am seeing if we want to be a championship basketball team.”

The Lakers followed both of Harper’s declarations with easy, roaring victories--both to close out the series.

8. MVP, SUPERMAN ... HE CAN PICK

Testimony from Harper, on O’Neal’s place in the basketball firmament: “Best player in the league? Best player in the universe! How’s that sound?”

Testimony from Jackson, on the day O’Neal won the most-valuable-player award, failing to draw the first-ever unanimous vote by the slightest of margins by the slightest of logic: “You know, you see players come along in our lifetime that perhaps haven’t fulfilled all the things they’d love to fulfill.

“That’s one of the things that I felt with Shaquille. You’d like to see this player who’s so talented, so dominant in our game, have the success that this game can give a person like that. . . . I think probably the most important thing for Shaquille is, ‘Can I win a championship, and when’s it going to come my way?’ ”

9. FIGHT TIME

Bryant had been in fights before, just never on national television, in a raucous game against the New York Knicks, and never had he twice been sucker-punched before he could retaliate.

All this happened April 2, in the second half of a tight game at Staples, when Bryant shoved Chris Childs after Childs tried to slow him down by grabbing his arm. In the resulting scrum, Childs fired two shots, Bryant missed with one, and then was pulled away quickly and all the way into the Laker locker room, where he steamed for at least half an hour.

“I think that’s one of the differences from this team to the teams in years past,” Bryant said after receiving a $100,000 fine and a one-game suspension, but happy that his teammates were there in force behind him. “We’re willing to take a stand. We’re willing to show teams that we’re fighting for one another, point blank.”

10. THE FINAL DAYS

Jackson looked tired, but his mind was active. He sat in an empty hotel meeting room on the outskirts of Indianapolis a day before Game 4, and put his finger on what made his team tick.

“What I’ve really liked about this team is that they’ve grappled within themselves, as to pulling themselves up by the bootstraps,” he said.

“A couple guys always seem to gather and get the result of the group going in the right direction, and not letting it spin out of control, so it hasn’t had to be all me pushing and pulling. I think some of the leadership we’ve had on this team has been very good. . . .

“You know, yeah, we think that we should win this,” Jackson said, finally. “We’re here now, we should win it.”