Robert Horry knows a thing or two about winning championships, having won seven of them during his time in the NBA. Three of those titles came with the Los Angeles Lakers when they three-peated from 2000 to 2002.
His first two seasons with the team, though, saw them get swept out of the playoffs on both occasions. It was only when Phil Jackson became the head coach in 1999 that the Lakers’ fortunes changed, and Horry revealed how he managed to bring the team together.
“I think when even when we was the Lakers we weren’t really a cohesive group,” Horry said on the All The Smoke podcast. “And Phil, one time Phil said, ‘Alright, nobody make any plans we all getting on the bus.’ Because he know when we make plans we on the road, you get to the hotel, we got limos, we all in a limo, we gone. He said nobody make plans. He made us all go to a comedy club. We went in through the backdoors… We all laughed and then from that moment on, we started doing a lot more things as a team. And it’s just amazing how we would come, ‘Oh yeah, we friends, we good,’ but we weren’t that close. And from that moment on we became closer.”
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Jackson was just a master when it came to man-management and he’d have realized fairly quickly that this team just wasn’t all that close. He had to find a way to bring them together and something as small as a trip to a comedy club was the first step to it. Although things would eventually end on a sour note as the relationship between Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant fell apart, Jackson did manage to lead them to three championships before it happened.
Kobe Bryant Once Spoke About How Phil Jackson Managed Him And Shaquille O’Neal
The relationship between Bryant and O’Neal was one that was always going to fall apart because of just how different the two were as individuals. Jackson had to find a way to keep them together as long as possible and Kobe once explained just how he did it.
Bryant stated that Jackson knew that he would show up to play no matter what was going on, so he created tension between them. That was the way for Jackson to get closer to O’Neal, who was a bit more emotional and wouldn’t have reacted well if they were the ones clashing. Kobe praised Jackson for this tactic, and it was quite smart on the Zen Master’s part.
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