At the height of their dominance, the Los Angeles Lakers were a dynasty built on two cornerstones who couldn’t stand each other.

Between 2000 and 2002, the Lakers pulled off a three-peat, steamrolling through the NBA with one of the most feared one-two punches the league had ever seen, Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant.

But there was a slow-burning tension that engulfed the locker room and wore down everyone in its orbit. The feud was visible and tangible. Even head coach Phil Jackson could only do so much before the storm consumed the silence.

Feuding enough

The Lakers’ “civil war” in the early 2000s was more than two superstars clashing over ego and legacy; it was a tension that spilled into team chemistry, roles, and power dynamics.

From Jackson to the front office, down to the role players who just wanted to do their job, it became a daily balancing act. The players around both superstars eventually gave up trying to play peacemakers.

“At one point, I think the players themselves thought that this is crazy and they just started ignoring them,” Jackson recalled.

It came after seasons of passive-aggressive interviews, tense moments in practice, and cold silences on team flights. The more Bryant and O’Neal grew apart, the more the team environment strained. The Lakers had a championship machine, but the engine room was overheating, and the locker room could only watch.

O’Neal was the force. A 7’1″, 325-pound unstoppable presence in the paint who commanded respect and the locker room stereo. Bryant, still in his early 20s during the Lakers’ first title run, was the obsessive technician who wanted not just to win, but to dominate — and to be seen as the reason why.

Their personalities clashed from the start.

In 1998, Bryant skipped team dinners and preferred solo workouts, while O’Neal, then the undisputed leader, called him out for being aloof and selfish. The younger Laker, in turn, criticized the big man’s work ethic, suggesting he relied too much on raw talent and not enough on preparation.

These weren’t mere differences but ideological divides on how to lead, how to train and how to win. Jackson had coached iconic duos before — Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen being the blueprint.

But Jordan and Pippen didn’t battle over the steering wheel. The Lakers’ front office watched the drama unfold, hoping that talent would outweigh turmoil. For a while, it did.

In the 2001 playoffs, they went 15-1, one of the most dominant postseason runs in NBA history. But behind the scenes, Jackson admits that internal tension has worn down the team from the inside.

Shaq vs. Kobe

As the feud went on, the team began to fracture. Younger players found themselves picking sides. Veterans who had seen quieter locker rooms before began to mentally check out. And according to Jackson, even the attempts to mediate eventually faded away.

“There was some little stuff like that that went on — that kind of petty stuff,” Jackson recalled. “But in reality, they always blended back together when it became a critical point of view. But there was just a ‘who’s the real leader’ type of thing going on… So I kind of let them play that for a while.”

The tension wasn’t always dramatic. Sometimes it was subtle. One side of the locker room would joke, mostly aligned with O’Neal. The other side would be quieter, more serious, dialed in with Bryant. The lines were clear enough that teammates, like Rick Fox and Derek Fisher, found themselves constantly navigating the middle ground.

Bryant had grown into a top-three player in the league and wanted the offense to tilt toward his skill set. O’Neal, though still dominant, wasn’t ready to cede the spotlight. Jackson let the Cold War play out, hoping it would resolve naturally under the weight of a shared goal.

The team kept winning — but barely. In 2003, they lost in the second round to the San Antonio Spurs. Despite adding Hall of Famers Karl Malone and Gary Payton, they fell short in the 2004 Finals to the Detroit Pistons.

That was the final straw. Shortly after, O’Neal was traded to the Miami Heat. Bryant stayed, and the team retooled around him. Still, those years left a lasting legacy. The Lakers won three straight titles despite the tension, not because it was resolved.

This story was originally reported by Basketball Network on Jul 17, 2025, where it first appeared.