Phil Jackson wasn’t even the coach of the Los Angeles Lakers when they got unceremoniously bounced out of the playoffs by the Utah Jazz in consecutive seasons: 4-1 in 1997, and a 4-0 sweep in 1998.
According to Shaquille O’Neal, though, those series apparently made enough of an impression on the Hall of Fame coach that when he was guiding the Lakers to a three-peat title run in 2000, ’01, and ’02, he strategically tanked games to avoid postseason matchups against the Jazz.
O’Neal, the Hall of Fame center now working as an analyst for TNT, claimed during Tuesday night’s “Inside the NBA” broadcast that Jackson intentionally held him out of certain games in order to create preferable postseason matchups — including avoiding the Jazz.
Such a Jazz-avoidance strategy seems unlikely to have occurred in the 1999-2000 season, when the Lakers earned the top seed in the West by virtue of a 67-15 record, and O’Neal played in 79 games. (Los Angeles avoided a Western Conference showdown that year with the second-seeded Jazz because Utah was unexpectedly steamrolled 4-1 by Portland in the second round.)
O’Neal’s theory is plausible for L.A.’s next two title runs, however.
In 2000-01, he appeared in just 74 games, and the Lakers earned the No. 2 seed in the West while the Jazz finished fourth (and were narrowly upset by Dallas in the first round). And in ’01-02, O’Neal played in just 67 games, as the Lakers slipped to third in the West — three games behind first-place Sacramento — thereby avoiding a first-round matchup against a then-aging Jazz team that plummeted to eighth in the West standings.
This is not the first time O’Neal has claimed on TNT that those Lakers intentionally tanked games to avoid the Jazz. In fact, he did so all the way back in 2012, seemingly implying then that the edict came in ’01-02, in order to avoid that potential first-round matchup.
The center is also on the record as a staunch defender of the late-era Stockton-to-Malone Jazz, noting how they ultimately helped the Lakers coalesce into a championship-caliber organization with that ’98 sweep — which drove home the point that a team playing collectively could beat an assembly of talent (that year’s Lakers team had four All-Star players).
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