In the late 1990s, the Los Angeles Lakers were one of the most talented teams in the NBA. With Shaquille O’Neal in his physical prime, potent guards Nick Van Exel and Eddie Jones and a budding teenager named Kobe Bryant, they seemed to be on the edge of greatness.
But they were swept out of the playoffs in 1998 and 1999, and it was clear they lacked something. So in June 1999, they hired Phil Jackson to be their head coach, hoping his mystical flower power and experience coaching the dynastic Chicago Bulls of the 1990s would be the missing ingredients.
He definitely changed the team’s culture. The 1999-2000 Lakers surprised everyone by winning 31 of their first 36 games. But they still had some growing to do before they could call themselves world champions, both on and off the court.
Robert Horry, a veteran forward on that team, recalled how Jackson got the team to bond by taking them out as a group to see a popular and hilarious stand-up comedian.
Via Lakers Nation:
“You got to like each other. You got to like each other, man, and I think I’ve never played it … like we would all go to dinners. I think when even when we was the Lakers we weren’t really a cohesive group. And Phil, one time Phil said, ‘Alright, nobody making plans we all getting on the bus’ because he knows 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 back doors, probably like this and we’re like, ‘Where the (expletive) we at,’ right? This is the first time I ever seen Fluffy (Gabriel Iglesias). He was funny as (expletive). We all laughed.
“And then from that moment on, we started doing a lot more things as a team. And it’s 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.”
One thing Jackson was known for doing was helping his players grow as men and not just basketball players. He would sometimes organize group activities to get his players to develop a unanimity that would translate to game action.
After a rough patch in January and early February, those Lakers started to come together, winning 19 games in a row. They then got through the Sacramento Kings, Phoenix Suns, Portland Trail Blazers and Indiana Pacers in the playoffs. Despite some drama versus Sacramento and Portland, they took home their first of three straight Larry O’Brien trophies.