Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant formed one of the greatest duos in NBA history on the Los Angeles Lakers, but tensions between them led to the pair breaking up far sooner than they should have. Former Lakers head athletic trainer Gary Vitti saw firsthand how the relationship between the two superstars deteriorated and spoke about it on the All The Smoke podcast.
“Not to take anything away from Shaq, but by his size alone, he could dominate,” Vitti said. “Plus, he had good hands, and he did have cat-like reflexes and that kind of thing, and so, he didn’t have to work as hard to be as dominant. And that was very obvious to everyone, especially Kobe, ‘So, I’m working my a** off, and you’re not.’ And we’re not winning, ’cause they came in ’96. We didn’t win till 2000. So, Kobe’s getting more and more pissed off.”
Vitti revealed he would get pissed off at O’Neal, too. He wanted the big man to get in better shape and revealed that they would fight as well. Not quite to the level that O’Neal and Bryant did, though.
“Kobe got really angry with him,” Vitti stated. “And Shaq’s like… looking at Kobe says, ‘You can’t win without me.’ And Kobe’s like, ‘Well, you can’t win without me.’ And then the schism starts. Now I’ve been on the record, and I’ll say it here again, it is really easy to blame Shaq and Kobe. Very easy to blame them. What about all the rest of us? We’re a team. Team’s like a family, right?
“Sometimes with your family, you get mad at your mom or your dad or your brother or your sister, but you don’t stop loving them,” Vitti continued. “It’s the same thing with a team. It’s hard to be loving every day with everybody. Somebody’s going to piss you off eventually. But literally, we stopped loving each other, and the more anger that was created, the more divisive it became, and people started choosing sides.
“Players chose sides, staffs chose sides, the fans chose sides, and the whole thing came apart,” Vitti added. “And it’s really troublesome to me. Sometimes I get choked up about it because it was my family. I mean, I have my family family, okay? But this was also my family. And we should have won 10. We literally should have won 10 championships.”
Now, 10 is a bit much, but O’Neal and Bryant would have won more. They led the Lakers to a historic three-peat from 2000 to 2002, and just two years later, it was all over. Tensions with Bryant and not getting the kind of new deal he wanted led to O’Neal wanting out in 2004. The Lakers traded him to the Miami Heat to drop the curtain on one of the most dominant eras in modern NBA history.
O’Neal believes he and Bryant would have won seven titles if they had stayed together. That is more realistic than Vitti’s projection of 10.
Both these men would find success following the divorce, but a winner did emerge. O’Neal first won it all with the Heat in 2006 to gain bragging rights. Unfortunately for him, Bryant would lead the Lakers to back-to-back titles in 2009 and 2010.
These two would remain at odds for years, but mended fences post-retirement. They did it before it was too late, as Bryant tragically passed away in a helicopter crash in January 2020. O’Neal expressed regret at not reaching out to him more often, but at least they had set their differences aside by then.
