The greatest one-two punch in the game of basketball, Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant of the Los Angeles Lakers were something more than the NBA had ever witnessed.
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There has not been a duo in the game’s history that was as dominant as the superstars of LA who were the face of the league at the turn of the century.
And while those hunters were on their run to make the league theirs, there were some hunted who must have wished they were not in the league at the time. But a former Nets forward was not one of them.
Kenyon Martin says there was no stopping Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant
One of the league’s most versatile players of the 2000s, who could get you easy buckets while also taking on the best player of the opposition team irrespective of the size of the player, Martin was a give it all guy.
K-Mart played in the league for 15 seasons and faced the likes of Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett, and LeBron James throughout his career and had a lot of success in guarding everyone in the league, but nobody dominated him as much as the Purple, and Gold duo.
He still remembers the 2002 NBA Finals series like it was yesterday not because it was his first NBA Finals at the mere age of 24, but because of the feeling he got when he saw Shaq dunking everyone on his team – “nothing could stop Shaq and Kobe”.
They would win three championships together before breaking up in 2004 after losing the Finals to the Detroit Pistons.
Why did Shaq and Kobe break up?
It was not the fact that they had lost the championship to a team without a real superstar, or that they lost in the Conference Finals before that year, it was the team environment.
LA couldn’t tolerate the back-and-forth between the league’s two top players anymore. That resulted in the Lakers offering Bryant to stay, which meant an exit for their 3x Finals MVP.
If not for their egos, Bryant and O’Neal would have won at least 8 championships together for as long as they played in the league. But the reality is always different.
