NRO
Weekend, February 3-4, 2001
Showtime
No More
What
the Shaq-Kobe feud means for the Lakers, the NBA, and the rest of America.
By
S. T. Karnick, editor in chief of American
Outlook magazine,
published by the Hudson Institute
f
you want to know exactly how NBA basketball became so brain-grindingly
boring in just a couple of years since Michael Jordan's retirement, the
problems of this year's defending champion Los Angeles Lakers are a good
place to start. The team's travails also provide an object lesson in the
limits of individualism, a seminar America has been attending with increasing
frequency in recent years.
The soap opera began earlier this season when Shaquille O'Neal, the Lakers' All-Star center, and Kobe Bryant, the team's astonishingly polished young (22 years old) scoring guard, began to criticize each other in the press. The argument was over which player was responsible for the team's less-than-spectacular start this season — the squad that had threatened the single-season victory record last year is now third in the Pacific Division and fourth in the Western Conference (behind even the elderly Utah Jazz). Shaq led the league in scoring last year, but Kobe leads it now. And after scoring 41 points against Houston a couple of weeks ago, Shaq threw a verbal elbow at teammate Bryant: "All nights — not most nights, all nights — I can score. And I've always been an unselfish player. If I get doubled [covered by two defenders], I set up my teammates." Kobe responded a few days later by compiling the first triple-double — double figures in points, rebounds, and assists, the mark of a well-rounded, unselfish player — of his career. But he did it by having his teammates call out how may assists and rebounds he needed, thereby turning the accomplishment into a selfish act.
Then, last Sunday, Shaq sat out the marquee game against the Knicks in Madison Square Garden on national television. He was suffering from plantar fascitis, a foot injury, but the Lakers were even more miserable than he. They looked terrible in losing 91-81 to a Knicks team whose two best big men were sidelined with injuries. Bryant scored 33 points but took 27 shots to do it. The Lakers were sloppy both defensively and offensively.
Despite this setback, Bryant clearly sees himself as the game's best player and one of the best of all time, and he believes that the veteran O'Neal simply has to accept it. In a recent ESPN The Magazine interview-article by Ric Bucher, Kobe stated, "Turn my game down? I need to turn it up. I've improved. How are you going to bottle me up? I'd be better off playing someplace else." Shaq, by contrast, sees no need for the change: "We had a certain program and it worked. I don't see us doing that same program." Bucher describes Kobe as "[a]n opportunist without a conscience," who "cares no more about Shaq's duress than he would about [Philadelphia's Allen] Iverson or VC [Toronto's Vince Carter] falling down and giving him the ball for a breakaway slam. No time for sympathy on the fast track to preeminence."
This was reflected quite clearly in an overtime loss to the woeful Golden State Warriors, the final minutes of which Bucher described as follows: "Shaq and Kobe ran a pick-and-roll on every possession down the stretch. Not once did Kobe lob the ball to Shaq, even after Shaq bluntly told him during a timeout, 'Drop it off.' Kobe wouldn't because he figured Shaq would get fouled and go to the free-throw line, where he's shooting a career-low 38.6 percent. Better to bet on himself, since he's shooting a career-high 47.7 percent from the floor and a career-high 87.3 percent from the line." Bucher quotes Kobe saying, "I trust the team. I just trust myself more. Yeah, we won last year with the offense going through Shaq. But instead of winning series in five and seven games, this year we'll have sweeps."
That's a bold prediction, but an increasingly unlikely outcome. More offense — Kobe's preferred approach — will not solve the Lakers' problems. As Bucher notes, "The Lakers led the league in scoring with 101.2 ppg through 33 games. Defensively, though, they've slid from last season's sixth in points allowed to 22nd and from first in field goal percentage to 15th. [Lakers coach Phil] Jackson and Shaq argue the switch from an interior to a perimeter offense has caused the slide. Phil's take: Kobe's early-clock jumpers mean an aging Lakers team must spend more time on defense. Longer shots also result in longer rebounds and more fast breaks, exposing L.A.'s weak transition D."
That's a reasonable analysis of the situation, but it conveniently elides Jackson's central role in the mess. Jackson, who coached his Bulls and Lakers teams to seven world championships and is known as a master manipulator of today's ego-driven players, has so far this season largely stood by in obvious frustration. This is in clear contrast to prior years, when he was known for hogging the limelight, surreptitiously undermining his superiors, and positioning himself as an eccentric genius whose unusual offensive scheme and use of Native American religious activities somehow molded selfish basketball players into unstoppable teams. Last season, his first as coach of the Lakers, Jackson blew into town on a big motorcycle, bought a house on the ocean, initiated a very public extramarital affair with team owner Jerry Buss's daughter, and forced out beloved former Lakers player and longtime director of basketball operations Jerry West.
The latter, however, was surely Jackson's biggest mistake, because it got him exactly what he most craved: full control over the team. West had built the team that won last year's championship, but Jackson was never happy with the player mix, particularly criticizing All-Star forward Glenn Rice, widely known as a selfish player and poor defender. With West gone and no one to stand in his way, Jackson traded Rice after the championship season and brought in Isaiah Rider, a player best known for missing team flights, suspensions for drug use, and complaints about not getting to shoot the ball often enough. Rider had been released by a miserable Atlanta Hawks team in midseason last year because of his frequent failure to show up for practice.
It's true that Rice has usually been lax on defense, but what he brought to the team was something Jackson had always had with his Bulls groups: a deadly accurate three-point shooter who could stretch defenses and open lanes for other players to get to the basket. In particular, Rice's outside shooting made it more risky for teams to collapse on Shaq, lest the behemoth center — a very skillful passer — kick the ball out to him for an open three-pointer. Rice's "selfishness" was in fact a key element in the Lakers' success, and it is important to note that the 6' 8" forward made some important sacrifices. Rice had long been a dangerous post-up player and slashing driver to the basket, but for Jackson he contented himself with jump shots. He never became a very good defender, but he gave what he had for the team, complaining occasionally but doing what he had to. "I gave up a lot for that team," Rice said after Sunday's game, and he was right.
Rider, by contrast, has been utterly ineffective; never a great jump shooter, he has added little to the team, and his moodiness has made Rice look stoic by contrast. The loss of Rice is surely the main reason that Shaq's scoring average is down this season, though the big center is still among the league leaders in points and second in rebounds. Kobe, to his credit, worked hard on his jump shot during the offseason, but one player cannot simultaneously stretch the defense and be the team's main offensive weapon, because you cannot draw double-teams on the perimeter the way a center can near the basket. The more outside shots Kobe takes, the worse the problem gets, as opposing teams grab long rebounds and pile up high-percentage fast-break baskets.
Further compounding the team's problems is the fact that almost all the players like and admire the jovial, lighthearted O'Neal and avoid the prideful Bryant, who tends to keep to himself. But it's not all personality. As Bucher puts it, "The allegiance to Shaq comes from the punishing screens he sets, the double teams he draws to get teammates open shots, and the layup-saving help he can provide when they're beaten off the dribble." Kobe is an enormously talented and dedicated player who can guard the other team's best ballhandler and create spectacular shots with the game on the line, but the reality is that the highest-percentage shots are close to the basket and big men like Shaq get most of them.
Jackson and the players may yet right the ship, and there is still time to make trades, but the Lakers' travails are part of a general malaise in the league. There is far too much emphasis on individual play, especially the dunk, that increasingly tedious staple of nighttime highlight reels. Pro basketball is now largely a slowed-down game of post-ups, screen-and-rolls, and isolation plays, in which usually only one or two offensive players are in motion, the rest standing around near the three-point line like starving dogs hoping to be tossed a bone. To some degree this is a legacy of Michael Jordan's elevation of individual athletic brilliance to a world-class entertainment vehicle, but the league could do a lot to change it. Commissioner David Stern sold the game as an exciting, flamboyant display of individual skills, and a change to a team orientation in both the rules and publicity would be most welcome. As it now stands, the game is selfish and boring, like the players themselves. The showboating, trashtalking, and general asininity of today's players are enough to make a normal person ashamed to watch. Attendance and television ratings are down, and should be.
The showboating in basketball, moreover, is different from that in other team sports. In baseball, football, and hockey, the celebrations have become annoying, but in those sports, scoring is extremely hard to do and it results in a stoppage of play. And in those sports, usually more than one player is involved in the celebration. In hockey, the player scoring a goal skates along his bench and high-fives every member of the team. The same is true in baseball, and football players also usually celebrate together. Only in basketball is the celebration typically an individualistic action, and only in basketball is it so often clearly directed as a putdown of the opponent.
These changes reflect a profound cultural shift in America, from a society that once valued both self-control and self-expression to one in which self-expression is utterly predominant. For a player to submerge himself in a team, the way Bob Cousy and Bill Russell did, now seems old-fashioned and even disreputable. Highlight reels and commercials are the measure of success, and the way to get on them is to show off. In American society in general, one sees a similar liking for flash and dash at the expense of substance, as is evident in the nation's increasingly superficial politics, entertainment culture, educational practices, sexual mores, and religious behavior.
Of course, the decline in pro basketball's popularity suggests that there may be more to a successful life than self-expression, but I suppose that no one will believe it unless somebody more clever than I can find a sensational way to say it. In the meantime, while Kobe and Shaq burn and Phil plays the fiddle, what was once the highest exemplar of a game loved and played by millions degenerates into a tedious forum for clothing advertisements. And in the words of Laker Ron Harper, "It stinks."
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