After the Los Angeles Lakers won the 2000 championship, you’d think the team would be ecstatic and united in trying to defend its title.

However, that didn’t seem to be the case, with Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant not getting along and the Lakers not appearing as dominant in the 2000-01 regular season as they did in the prior campaign.

SLAM caught up to O’Neal near the end of the regular season and asked him about his fragile relationship with Bryant, which mirrored his “contentious breakup” with Penny Hardaway some years earlier on the Orlando Magic.

“I don’t have to get along,” Shaq said. “I’m the Don Dada. I’m too big to ride in the backseat of anybody’s car. They gotta get along with me. Period.”

Shaq the bus driver

Clearly, the “Big Aristotle” had no plans of being the second fiddle to anyone else during the earlier parts of his career.

When he played with Hardaway on the Magic, it was clear that he was the better player, and Penny was more suited for a sidekick role.

However, Shaq decided to leave in 1996 to go to Los Angeles.

He has offered varying explanations for his decision, but he once shared that one of them was hearing from the organization that it was Penny’s team.

While O’Neal wanted Hardaway to get paid, he got offended about being lowballed and didn’t want to earn less than his teammate.

On the Lakers, the big guy was always adamant that the team was his, even though Bryant had the potential to turn out to be the better player.

Even Shaq admitted in the past and recently acknowledged that Kobe was the greatest player on the team during his time with the Purple and Gold.

O’Neal took the backseat

Despite the struggles Los Angeles experienced in the 2000-01 regular season, none of those mattered when the playoffs arrived. The squad had one of the most dominant runs in playoff history that year, losing just one game on its way to repeating as champions.

Unfortunately, the disconnect between Shaq and Bryant only grew from thereon. They continued to lead the Lake Show to another title in 2002, completing a three-peat, but their feud had only become more public and irreparable.

Everything came to a head after the 2004 Finals as the Lakers lost to the Detroit Pistons in humiliating fashion. O’Neal decided he wanted out, and Bryant was ecstatic to see him gone from the franchise.

Shaq had a fresh start with the Miami Heat, where he finally learned to let someone else take the wheel. For the first time in his NBA career, he wasn’t his team’s leading scorer, with Dwyane Wade scoring 24.1 points per game, 1.2 more than Shaq’s average points in the 2004-05 regular season.

O’Neal eventually benefitted from his choice because he claimed another ring serving as a sidekick to “Flash” in the 2005-06 campaign.