For all of their success, one of the enduring legacies of Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal’s partnership is the fact that they led the last successful three-peat in North America’s four major professional sports leagues.
From 2000-02, the Los Angeles Lakers won three straight NBA titles, a level of success that the Chiefs tried to match this season but ultimately came up short of achieving following their 40-22 loss to the Eagles in Super Bowl LIX. Kansas City joined the eight previous back-to-back Super Bowl champions that were unable to three-peat. The 1965-67 Packers remain the NFL’s last team to win three straight titles.
The early 2000s Lakers’ success came at the heels of the Michael Jordan-led Chicago Bulls’ dominance of the NBA in the ’90s that included not one but two successful three-peats. The 2000s Lakers’ three-peat concluded just four years after Jordan led the Bulls to their second successful three-peat and less than two years after the Yankees won their third consecutive World Series title.
Four three-peats in less than a decade’s time probably watered down the Lakers’ accomplishment. Instead of celebrating it, the immediate question was how many more titles Kobe and Shaq would win together in the coming years.
The answer was ultimately zero. Los Angeles’ sweep of Jason Kidd’s Nets in the 2002 NBA Finals was the final championship for those Lakers teams. The Lakers made it back to the NBA Finals in 2004, only to get flattened by the Detroit Pistons in a gentlemen’s sweep. Shaq was traded that offseason, thus ending one of the most successful, entertaining and polarizing partnerships in the history of sports.
Dominant is also a word you could accurately use to describe the Lakers in those years. The 2001 Lakers went 15-1 in the playoffs, as it took a herculean effort from Allen Iverson in the Finals for Los Angeles to suffer a postseason loss. The Lakers responded to their lone playoff loss with four straight wins en route to successfully defending their title.
A year later, the Lakers breezed past the Trailblazers and Spurs in the first two rounds before surviving an epic, seven-game battle with the Kings. In the Finals, Kobe and Shaq’s talent was on full display as they dismantled the outmatched Nets in four games.
In the decades since their time together, there seems to have been more of a focus on what Kobe and Shaq didn’t do together. That might start to change, however, if they continue to stand as the last partnership that won three consecutive titles together, a stretch of time that is now at 23 years and counting.
