Kobe Bryant and Phil Jackson enjoyed tremendous success together on the Lakers as the two led the team to 5 NBA championships. Jackson coached Kobe for 11 seasons but despite all the success they were having, the two weren’t on great terms for much of Jackson’s first tenure with the team which ended in 2004.
The Lakers were falling apart internally that year, as that tensions kept rising between Kobe and Shaquille O’Neal, while Bryant and Jackson were also increasingly at odds with each other. After the Lakers were stunned in the 2004 NBA Finals by the Pistons, Jackson left the team and O’Neal was traded less than a month after Jackson’s departure. In the aftermath of that bitter exit, Jackson wrote a book titled The Last Season, where he was very critical of Bryant and called him uncoachable.
Kobe Bryant Trolled Phil Jackson When He Was Being Criticized For The Job He Was Doing As The President Of The Knicks
Despite some scathing remarks regarding Bryant in that book, the Lakers re-hired Jackson the following year as head coach, a decision that the great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar recently condemned. Jackson and Bryant managed to put their differences aside and got along this time around and they would win back-to-back championships in 2009 and 2010. Jackson would then retire from coaching in 2011 and by that point, the two were on good terms.
Jackson would return to the NBA in 2014 as president of the Knicks but while he had been a great coach, he was a terrible executive. The Knicks won just 80 games in total in his three full seasons as an executive and he was getting blasted by just about everybody toward the end. Bryant was asked back in 2019 about what he was feeling when Jackson was getting criticized and he had a hilarious response.
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“I thought it was funny. I told Phil, I said, ‘Phil you know this is all just karma for writing literally three books about me. This is your karma.’ It was all in good fun.”
Jackson did write quite a few books and some of them did focus on Bryant in a not-very-positive light, but that didn’t affect their relationship too much as the years went by. Kobe even said earlier in this interview that Jackson is like a father figure to him.
As for Jackson’s end in New York, he and the Knicks would part ways in 2017 but fans still haven’t forgiven him for the terrible job he did there. Stephen A. Smith blasted him a couple of months back for passing up on Donovan Mitchell and drafting Frank Ntilikina in 2017 and that was just one of the many awful decisions he made during his time there.
