Laker Stars’ Discord Breaks Into Open

Locked in a post-championship stare-down, Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant are tugging again at the dynamic of their team and their association.

The NBA’s two best players, the very breath of an NBA championship that energized all of Southern California not seven months ago, cannot agree on the next step, the one that will return the Lakers to that standard.

Bryant, 22 and in his fifth professional season, wants the Lakers to change. O’Neal, 28, wants what already worked once.

This week, 2 1/2 months into the defense of their league title, the tension that skulked mainly in their locker room and in their private conversations revealed itself.

“I haven’t had any thought of bringing them together,” Laker Coach Phil Jackson said. “I don’t even want them in the same room together right now.”

The Lakers have strained to maintain their pace of last season, struggling under massive expectations. At the same time, Bryant has asserted it was time for him to take some control of the offense, words that reinforced his more aggressive on-court tack.

O’Neal, the center and team captain, has continued to call for the basketball, demanding that he command the game from his position in the low post. So escalated the grudge that was supposed to die with the championship, that would wane with the maturation of two unyielding men who had grown to respect each other.

Bryant says it is too late to go back, that the Lakers can’t ever be exactly what they were last season, and that the growth--and it is growth, he insists--is irreversible.

If that’s the case, O’Neal says, the Lakers’ hopes to repeat their championship season might just die, probably in a clutch of hair-trigger decisions and jump shots.

Their relationship, tenuous even in victory, when they stood shoulder to shoulder to beat back the Indiana Pacers in six games of the NBA finals last June, is frayed again, perhaps worse than ever.

Bryant is a flashy, open-court player whose skills have been compared to those of Michael Jordan, generally acknowledged as the best player ever. O’Neal, at 7 feet, 330 pounds, the best center of this generation, is brutally powerful. Playing together, they could make the Lakers title contenders for the next decade.

While 14 other players walked away from an early afternoon practice Wednesday afternoon, O’Neal sat in the corner of a gym at the Laker training facility in El Segundo, his expression as flat as his worst free throw, and tore into the topic that has gripped the world of Los Angeles sports for years.

“I’ve never been one to get into whose team it is,” O’Neal said. “But, clearly, when everything went through me, the outcome was [an NBA-best record of] 67-15, playing with enthusiasm, the city was jumping up and down, we had a parade. Now we’re 23-11. So you figure it out.

“I’m a proven commodity. Everybody knows what I can do. I know what I can do.”

The sudden emergence of the dispute into the public eye surprised even close observers of the team. As league champions under Jackson’s guidance, the Laker players have been more than discreet in keeping the team’s problems to themselves.

The Lakers lead the league in scoring, primarily because Bryant and O’Neal combine for nearly 56 points a game. But sometimes the offense skips Bryant, because other players fear he will take a reckless shot. And sometimes the offense bypasses O’Neal, because he misses more than 60% of his free throws, a frailty that has become a familiar weapon for opposing coaches eager to put him on the free-throw line.

“But for the most part, Shaq delivers for us,” Bryant said. “There are certain things in the course of the game we don’t agree on--he’s a post presence and I’m a wing presence--especially down the stretch when guys like to foul him all the time. But there’s ways to get around that.

“There’s nothing wrong with our offense. Defense is what’s killing us. I think we have to improve as a basketball club in that department.”

Jackson, the motivator who won six NBA championships as coach of the Chicago Bulls, stands in the middle, and not at all uncomfortably. When he brought O’Neal and Bryant together last season, when he blended their games into the championship, he was called masterful. It appears the task is at least as large this season.

Though Jackson made an early-season point of asking Bryant if he believed he could co-exist with O’Neal, there was no such meeting with O’Neal.

As O’Neal said Wednesday, “I don’t have to coexist with anybody. I’ve proven I’m here to do a job. I’ve always been an unselfish big man, play defensive, rebound, score when I get the ball in the paint. That’s all I do. That’s what we’re used to doing. That’s what we did last year. We got an extra gold ball for [Laker owner Jerry Buss]. That’s what we need to continue to do to form a dynasty. If not, we’ll see what happens.”

Jackson actually seconded the opinion: Bryant must play to O’Neal, and that is why Jackson would not ever ask O’Neal if he thought he could play alongside Bryant.

“Shaq’s the captain of this team,” Jackson said. “He’s had the leadership of this ballclub for some time. As a leader he can step into that vacuum and talk about that, as a leader, whenever he wants.”

To a town’s fans dying to hear him predict the relationship will warm again, that the basketball will be whole again, O’Neal would only say, “It did last year. It worked out to the city’s, to the organization’s favor. I don’t know why anybody else would want to change, other than for selfish reasons.”

Twenty minutes later, Bryant, at the bluest point of the firestorm, stood in the same gym, camera lights flickering off his sunglasses, and sighed at the attention. His breakout year--29.6 points per game on a career-high shooting percentage--has been fouled by the controversy. Though he glides through life with an easy, wry smile, this can’t be what he expected to come of 2,000 made jumpers a day, every day, last summer.

“He obviously wants to go back to A.C. [Green] being here and Glen [Rice] being here,” Bryant said of veteran players no longer with the Lakers. “It’s a different ballclub, a different year. We have new players. Things change. Things evolve. You just have to grow with that change.”

That won’t take with O’Neal, not after he spent most of his lifetime falling just short of championships. Then came last season, and along came Jackson. Bryant missed the first five weeks with a hand injury and returned dutifully subordinate to O’Neal and into the flow of the offense. Of course, that ended with the Lakers’ first championship in 12 years, and with O’Neal’s sweep of the NBA MVP awards (All-Star Game, season and finals).

“Last year was my first championship,” O’Neal said. “We just need to go back to that. I’ve always been known as a great-passing big man. So the problem doesn’t come from me. I don’t have a problem.

“We just have to do the same thing we did last year. Come down, throw it in, Shaq gets doubled, kick it out, take the shot from there.”

Said Jackson: “Kobe knew how we played last year. Shaq’s not going to change. He’s going to play the same game. He’s not going to bring the ball down the court and pull up for a three-point shot, I don’t think. He hasn’t yet. When that happens, then I’ll have a talk with him.”

Jackson smiled at that. He gives the impression that he can handle this, just as Bryant promises that there is nothing in his relationship with O’Neal that could harm this team.

“My relationship with Shaq is fine,” Bryant said. “Obviously we go our separate ways. But we’re cool. I support him, he supports me, we get the job done.”

Anyway, he said, it is neither man’s team to have, so the tussle would be fruitless.

“It’s Phil’s team,’ he said. “There are no ifs, ands or buts about it. This is his team. We play his way. We run his triangle offense. We’ll win his way.

“It’s not Shaq’s team. It’s not my team. It’s Phil’s team.”

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