Part 27 (1/2)
It wasn't an empty threat. After the playoffs he asked me how much progress we were making to bring in new talent. I told him we had talked about free agents and were considering players who might be available, but so far no deals had been made. ”I guess I'm going to have to do something about that,” he said.
A few weeks later, enraged by a story in the Los Angeles Times by Mark Heisler in which a ”Laker insider” claimed that Kobe was responsible for the post-Shaq mess, Kobe made his displeasure public in a radio interview with ESPN's Stephen A. Smith. He criticized Dr. Buss for not being up front with him about the direction he wanted to take the team and demanded to be traded. Later, when speaking to other reporters, Kobe confirmed his desire to move on and said that he'd be willing to waive the no-trade clause in his contract to make that happen. In fact, during a training session that off-season for the 2008 Olympic team, he gave reporters no indication of whether or not he'd be suiting up in purple and gold when training camp rolled around in October.
There was one strong trade possibility in the offing that had the potential to get Kobe to change his mind and stay. That was with Minnesota for center Kevin Garnett. My hope was that Garnett would be a good partner for Kobe and that his addition to the lineup would help calm Kobe down and motivate him to recommit to the team. What's more, bringing Garnett on board could set us up for another solid champions.h.i.+p run. But the trade fell apart at the last minute when Boston made an offer that Minnesota and Garnett found more attractive. Years later Garnett admitted that he wasn't in favor of the L.A. deal, in large part because of Kobe's dissatisfaction with the team.
None of us was thrilled by the prospect of trading Kobe. It's almost impossible to get equal value when you trade a player of his stature. The best deal you can hope for is one that gets you two solid starters and maybe a good draft pick, but not a comparable star. Nevertheless, Dr. Buss met up with Kobe in Barcelona over the summer and agreed to entertain trade offers from other teams as long as Kobe stopped mouthing off about it in the media. After a month or two without any progress, Kobe and his agent requested permission to put together a deal themselves and had several conversations with the Chicago Bulls, but nothing ever came of those efforts.
Right before the start of the 200708 season, Dr. Buss, Jim Buss, Mitch Kupchak, and I held several meetings with Kobe and his agent to discuss possible trades. None of them made any sense from a business perspective, so Dr. Buss asked Kobe to hang in there while we waited for better offers to emerge. Explaining his rationale, he told Kobe, ”If I had a diamond of great value-say four carats-would I give it up for four diamonds of one carat each? No, there is no equal value we can get from a trade that would match what you bring to the team.”
I granted Kobe a few days off from practice to mull over his options. I wasn't unsympathetic to his dilemma, even though I still believed we could turn the Lakers around. No question, losing Kobe would be a blow to the organization and to me personally. Kobe and I had been through tough times together, and during the past two seasons we'd started to forge a stronger relations.h.i.+p.
The will-he-or-won't-he question hung over the team like a thick band of clouds, and the rest of the players were distressed by all the uncertainty. I counseled them not to worry because Kobe's decision was out of our hands. All we could do was rededicate ourselves to the team and prepare for the upcoming season. We needed to be ready for whatever happened, with Kobe or without him.
As with everything else in life, the instructions remain the same, despite changing circ.u.mstances: Chop wood, carry water.
CHAPTER 20
DESTINY'S CHILDREN
Connection is why we're here. It's what gives purpose and meaning to our lives.
BRENe BROWN
A funny thing happened while we were in limbo: A new, more dynamic team began to emerge.
Opening night at the Staples Center was rocky. We lost 9593 to the Rockets, and the crowd booed Kobe when he was introduced. But three days later we went to Phoenix and beat our nemesis, the Suns, decidedly, 11998. Our leading scorer that night was newcomer Vladimir Radmanovic with 19 points, and we had four other players in double digits. Derek Fisher, who had rejoined the Lakers in the off-season, viewed the win as a harbinger of things to come. As he later put it, ”That game planted just the small seed in our mind that if we played the right way, we could be pretty darn good.”
By mid-January, we had a 24-11 record and had beaten most of the best teams in the league. One of the reasons for our early success was the coming of age of Andrew Bynum, who had been working on his footwork and pa.s.sing skills with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Kurt Rambis and had developed into a serious scoring threat. Kobe was quick to notice and started using him in screen-rolls, which created a lot of easy shots for Andrew. In the first three months, he averaged a career-high 13.1 points and 10.2 rebounds a game.
Another reason for our success was the influx of energy from several young backup players, including Radmanovic, Jordan Farmar, Luke Walton, and Sasha Vujacic. Although this crew still had a lot to learn, they'd come a long way. Best of all, they were lively and enthusiastic and improved the team's chemistry. And when they were clicking, they added a new, fast-moving dimension to our attack that was hard to stop. In late November we also acquired another talented young player, Trevor Ariza, in a trade with Orlando. He was a quick, versatile small forward who could attack the basket and hit outside shots on the run.
The third-and probably most important-reason for our early breakthrough was the second coming of Derek Fisher. Fish was a veteran of our run of three straight champions.h.i.+ps, and his return to the Lakers after three years at Golden State and Utah gave us a mature, experienced leader who could run the offense and give the team a much-needed sense of order.
As I've mentioned, one of the keys to our approach is to give players the freedom to find their own destiny within the team structure. Fish wasn't a creative playmaker like Steve Nash or Chris Paul. But he took advantage of his strengths-mental toughness, clutch outside shooting, and coolheadedness under pressure-to create a role for himself that not only worked for him but had a profound impact on the team.
”It sounds more mystical than it really is,” he says of the process he went through. ”The coaches' goal was to set down some basic guidelines for us on how to play basketball together as a group. And then you were expected to create your own chart for everything else. It was an uncanny way of creating organization without over-organizing. It wasn't about what they thought you should be doing, the way many coaches do. They stepped back and let you find your own way.”
In his first incarnation with the Lakers, Fish started out as a backup guard. But he was a diligent student of the game and he continued to add new skills to his repertoire until he worked his way into a starting role in 2001, after Ron Harper left. And though at first he had trouble breaking through screens on defense, he learned to use his formidable strength to muscle his way around big men. He also developed a deadly three-point shot that came in handy in the closing minutes when opponents would gang up on Kobe, leaving Fish wide open to do serious damage. By the time we reached the three-peat season, Fish had become the Lakers' third leading scorer behind Shaq and Kobe.
He also was one of the most selfless players I've ever coached and a role model for the rest of the players. At the start of the 200304 season, I asked him to give up his starting job to make room for Gary Payton, and he did so without complaint. Yet as the season progressed, I increased his playing time, especially at the close of games. The offense just flowed more smoothly when Fish was on the floor.
After that season, he became a free agent and landed a lucrative five-year deal with the Warriors, but he never found a comfortable role for himself there. Two years later they traded him to Utah, where he played a key role as a backup guard in the team's drive to the Western Conference finals. But when his daughter was diagnosed with eye cancer that year, Fish approached me about coming back to L.A., where she could get better medical care. Eventually he worked out a deal with Mitch Kupchak that involved getting out of his contract with the Jazz and signing a new one with the Lakers at a reduced salary.
When Fish showed up, I made him cocaptain. I also told him that I wanted to give backup point guard Jordan Farmar 20-plus minutes per game because he was good at coming off the bench and igniting the attack with his quickness and speed. Fish was fine with that, and together they averaged 20.8 points per game. Once I asked Fish what he needed to improve his game. He replied that he'd like to get more shots, but he knew that he'd have to take what he could get because someone had to run the offense, and it wasn't going to be Kobe or Lamar.