Character Driven (26 page)

In that series, Kobe was chosen to take my place in the rotation. No one said anything to me, but I didn’t play a single minute, and we were swept by the Jazz. That was hard for me. I felt that the year had been so positive, and then it ended on such a negative note for the team and for me. I wasn’t the only one puzzled, and some newspaper stories and some rumors swirled around that Kobe’s agent had put pressure on the team’s management, who put pressure on the coach, to figure out a way to get him more minutes. The reasoning likely went something like this: You picked him with your first selection. You’ve invested a lot of money in him and think he’s going to be a part of your future. I represent other players in the league who will become free agents. They’re going to listen to me about good opportunities.

I can’t say for certain those conversations took place, and I’m no conspiracy theorist, but stranger things have gone on. At the time I was confused, and that off-season I found myself in a familiar place. I had done well, but I was going to have to do more to solidify my standing on the team. I thought I’d proved my value, but the word
proved
is past tense: I was going to have to keep proving it. In retrospect, I should have learned some other lessons, and I kind of did but not fully. They are: Control what you can and don’t worry about the rest (in other words, my paying any attention to those rumors and speculations was a waste of time and energy). Everyone wins when the team wins. You can control performance and results, so work on improving your performance. Make yourself invaluable in some way.

I had already figured out the last one. When I got to the pros and looked back on some of what had happened in AAU ball and high school, I realized that a lot of times coaches wouldn’t start me or play me the minutes I deserved or whatever because I was not likely to complain. They could treat me in a way they might not have treated someone else because I wasn’t going to rock the boat. With the Lakers, though, rocking the boat was not something I wanted or needed to do. I understood that as I moved up the ladder, there were fewer and fewer spaces on the rung. Why would a team keep a guy if he was a “troublemaker”? Finding a backup point guard wouldn’t be that tough. So I made myself invaluable by being a good teammate and a team player. That didn’t mean that I wouldn’t eventually go to a coach to respectfully ask for more information about some decision, but I wasn’t going to take my questions to the media or to the locker room and poison it. That too was a waste of energy. Worrying, kicking up dirt, and all that other stuff was unproductive. I’d always been taught the old-school way—keep your mouth shut and let your play do the talking.

At that point, and more so at other points in my career, I was angry about suspect decisions regarding me. But I learned not to act out of anger and not to speak out of anger. I needed to step away from the situation. In the season, that was especially true. Another game was always in the pipeline, and the worst thing I could do was let my anger, confusion, disappointment, etc., carry over from one game to the next. The same was true with one season to the next. Fortunately, I had time to work things out in my mind and approached my sophomore season with a clean slate.

As badly as my first season ended, the next season the ball came bouncing up for me. As so often happens in the game and in life, that bounce back up for me came at the expense of a bad bounce for someone else. At the start of the 1997–98 season, Nick Van Exel had problems with his knee and couldn’t go at the start of the season. Everyone hoped that rest would help. That meant that I was going to be the starter as the season opened. We were in Indiana playing the Pacers, and the game was going to be the opening-night broadcast for TBS. Bryan Burwell came up to me moments after I learned that I was going to start and I said, “I’m just here to help us win. I’m not concerned at all about my statistics.” Well, I think not being concerned with them helped because I once again took advantage of an opportunity and started off well by scoring 20 points that night, by far my greatest point production as a professional to that point.

Some seasons seem to be a blur to me, but I have such a clear recollection not of that whole game, but of one play. Late in the fourth quarter, we were up by just a few points and I brought the ball up court. I dribbled to the wing and fed the ball into Shaq on the block, and as expected, they double-teamed Shaq and I was open. As he did thousands of times in his career, Shaq kicked the ball back out this time to me for a wide-open look. I rose up, and halfway there, I knew the shot was good, and it was. It was just as we’d drawn it up, was just as we’d run it hundreds of times in practice. That basket seemed to break the Pacers’ spirit, and we went on to the victory. I can still picture that jumper floating in the air, almost seeming to hang suspended at its apex before coming down softly. After the game, I did a TBS interview, and we joked about my pregame statement. Just imagine if I had cared about my stats.

I continued to play well at the start of that season, including scoring 18 points against the Knicks on national television. Oddly, maybe the highest compliment I was paid was against the Knicks in New York. I fouled out, but the Knicks crowd was so glad to see me leave, their taunting and singing told me just how effectively I’d been playing. The following Monday, in an NBA recap in
USA Today,
in their power rankings, they asked if Derek Fisher was the best backup point guard in the NBA. The sports information department at UALR sent me a copy of that, and it felt good to be getting that kind of recognition in a national publication. Even more gratifying, we were doing well. We won our first eleven out of the gate, and the longest losing streak we had was three games (which occurred twice). We ended with a regular-season record of 61-21. We beat Portland again in the opening round and faced Seattle in the Western Conference semifinals. We lost the first game on the road, then swept the next four games to advance to the conference finals against the Utah Jazz.

If I’d thought that the earlier rounds of the play-offs were intense, the conference finals were frenzied. With so much media coverage and so much excitement about the matchup to see who would go to the finals, the buildup and anticipation were almost painful. I was so eager to get out there and play. I was starting every game in the play-offs, but splitting the minutes with Nick Van Exel. He had been great all year about the situation, even telling the coaches that he was okay with coming off the bench because he didn’t want to disrupt the chemistry that I’d developed with the guys as a part of the starting five. That was the kind of selfless action that you need to be successful, and his putting the team’s interest ahead of his own reinforced what I’d always been taught and believed.

Unfortunately, all that hype meant nothing once the series began. Getting swept in four games was painful. Worse, we contributed a lot to our demise with bad fouls, turnovers, missed free throws, and a bunch of other lost opportunities. Going back over each of those games in my mind was not fun, but I felt that I needed to do it. Taking ownership of a loss is important. When you do that, you turn some of that negative energy into positive. We couldn’t just forget about it, we had to look at what had gone on to see where we needed to improve and figure out the why of our poor performance. Losses are sometimes referred to as setbacks, but that’s true only if you let them be so. I think you often learn a lot more from a failure than a success. I don’t mean blaming it on the coaches, the referees, or any other externals. If you can honestly assess yourself and your performance and devise a plan to improve, then you’ll have more confidence the next time you’re in that situation. It’s kind of like this: If the problem is X, and I do Y to overcome that problem, then next time the result should be Z—a victory for my side.

The frustrating thing about analyzing the Utah Jazz of that vintage was that a lot of the time you knew what was going to happen on the offensive end—a pick-and-roll between John Stockton and Karl Malone—but they executed it so well and the play so seamlessly suited their unique skills that even if you did a good job defending it, you still couldn’t stop it. Having to play against John Stockton in that series really helped my development as a player. Defending against him and the pick-and-roll fed into the most competitive part of my personality. How could we defend against that play? I was definitely disappointed about the outcome of the season, and watching the Chicago Bulls defeat the Jazz with the six-feet-eight-inch Scottie Pippen harassing John Stockton didn’t give me much insight. I wasn’t going to be able to grow seven inches over the summer, but I had grown as a player in my two years in the league. I’d doubled the number of minutes per game I averaged and just about doubled my scoring average. I knew it was impossible to expect that I could repeat that amount of statistical increase each year in the league, but for the foreseeable future, that was what I hoped to do.

What watching those finals did do for me was to stoke the fires of my desire to be an NBA champion. I also simply loved watching two teams or two individuals go after each other in just about any sport. I loved the purity of it and, when the game or the series was over, to see all that raw emotion spilling out of the guys. I hoped that I’d experience that one day—sooner rather than later. I was angry that we’d been swept, but that would only carry me so far. Eventually, I’d get over the anger and get back to work. I was ready to let the ball come bouncing back up, but something loomed large on the horizon of the 1998–99 season. The collective bargaining agreement between the Players Association and the owners was voided in March when the NBA exercised its option to terminate the 1995 agreement at the conclusion of the 1997–98 season. They reasoned that salaries had gone out of control. That year, the players earned an all-time high of 57 percent of basketball-related income (BRI), and the average salary rose to $2.36 million. The NBA owners wanted to roll salaries back to 48 percent of BRI and install a hard-cap system that would effectively eliminate guaranteed contracts. We couldn’t agree to those demands—particularly not the big pay cut at a time when revenues were so high.

It wasn’t going to be easy, but we all stuck together, even though we knew that it would cost every one of us a lot of money if the work stoppage went for long. But right was right, and we stood strong under the leadership of our president, Patrick Ewing. Even though many of us had guaranteed contracts, the owners refused to pay. We took them to court over the issue but lost. I was solidly behind our union, but the expectations that I had going into the 1998–99 season made it hard for me to just sit and wait and wonder. The Lakers had traded Nick Van Exel, effectively handing the starting job to me, but I wondered if there would be any games to start. When the date for the opening of training camps passed, then the start of the regular season, then Christmas, and then with the announcement that the All-Star game had been canceled, things looked bleak. We’d been kept apprised of the status of the negotiations and had attended an association meeting in Las Vegas to get the latest lowdown, but basically all we heard was that we needed to sit tight, stay together, and we’d come out on top.

I was working out in Los Angeles, but we didn’t have any informal team workouts until finally, in mid-January, an agreement was reached and we could return to work after 191 days out. The lockout was costly, with losses of $400 million in player salaries and close to $1 billion in owner, team, and league revenues. The damage we did to fans couldn’t be measured. I remembered thinking that the average person hearing about our salaries couldn’t relate to what we were holding the line over, but the six-year deal we signed was fair to both parties. A luxury tax was imposed, but the “midlevel exception” came our way along with increased minimum salaries, up to $1 million for players with ten years of service, and a significantly increased benefits package including a 401(k) plan. As is true in our country generally, a big gap exists between what the superstars make and the salaries of the rest of us. That gap was closed a bit and that worked to everyone’s benefit.

The timing of the lockout couldn’t have been worse for me. I had signed the league-mandated rookie contract after being drafted, so I was moving into my last year of it. Not being able to play a full season could hurt my chances of having a great season and being in a better bargaining position. Even though we didn’t play until February, I was still learning a lot about basketball, but mostly about the business side of things. I tried to keep up with all the negotiation points because I felt that I needed to know what was going on. I trusted the people in positions of power in the association, but knowledge was power as well.

With everything in an upheaval and with an abbreviated training camp and four-game preseason, I should have expected that things would be weird, and they were—except not in a way I’d even thought of. One day before the first regular-season game, Coach Harris asked me about my mind-set. He said that I shouldn’t get my hopes up too high. I was in the last year of my contract and the temptation was to try to do too much, to dream too big about the dollars that might come floating my way. He wanted me to keep on an even level and not focus on some big reward at the end of the year. All that made sense, but I’d never before had a coach discuss anything to do with contracts or salaries. I didn’t know if I should thank him or if I should have been suspicious. Then he told me that they’d brought in the veteran guard Derek Harper who would play fourth-quarter minutes.

None of this was what I expected to hear or to have be my reality. It was as if I’d been transported back to high school or AAU ball and I had a coach doubting my ability to perform when it mattered. I was confused because the team had traded their starting point guard, had essentially anointed me the go-to guy at the position, but then changed their mind. Maybe with the fifty-game abbreviated season they thought they needed to take a different approach and couldn’t afford the time for me to grow in fourth-quarter situations. I wasn’t sure what was up, or what Coach Harris was really thinking, but that get-off-to-a-quick-start thing made more sense when we went 6-6 out of the box and Coach Harris got fired. After one game under Bill Bertka as our interim coach, former Laker Kurt Rambis took over. We went 24-13 under him and 31-19 overall, finishing fourth in the conference. We lost in the second round to San Antonio and Tim Duncan, and we’d definitely not made the kind of progress we’d expected after reaching the conference final the year before. The whole season had a nightmarish quality with everything seeming disjointed and out of sync. I wound up starting only twenty-one of the fifty games, and my minutes and scoring average were nearly identical to the previous season. Not much progress there either.