Double Dip

Shaquille O'Neal strolled down a hallway of the First Union Center in Philadelphia last Friday night carrying his Finals MVP trophy and leaving the scent of Dom P�rignon in his wake. "Smell that?" he said. "That's what winning smells like."

He ducked as he entered a makeshift television studio, where his purple-and-gold Los Angeles Lakers jersey hung on a blue curtain next to Philadelphia 76ers star Allen Iverson's. As Shaq deadpanned his way through the interview, Kobe Bryant walked onto the set to await his turn before the camera. With a garish Lakers leather jacket over his uniform and his championship cap askew, Bryant bobbed his head happily as he hummed to himself and cradled the championship trophy, looking like a little boy who had finally gotten the present he'd always wanted.

When O'Neal finished his interview, he saw Bryant standing in the wings, and both men put their hardware down to high-five and embrace. Then, as Shaq exited and Bryant took his place in front of the camera, a member of the TV crew took down the O'Neal jersey from the curtain, revealing Bryant's number 8 uniform hanging behind it. In an instant Shaq's room had turned into Kobe's.

The Lakers wrapped up their second straight NBA title with the closest thing to a perfect postseason the league has ever known, largely because they made a series of similarly deft transitions. They went back and forth during the playoffs, from O'Neal's team to Bryant's and from Bryant's to O'Neal's, without missing a beat—and nearly without being beaten. The 108-96 victory over the noble but overmatched Sixers in Game 5, which wrapped up the championship, was L.A.'s 23rd in 24 games dating back to the regular season, and only Philadelphia's overtime win in Game 1 at the Staples Center kept the Lakers from becoming the first champion to complete an undefeated postseason. "It's especially satisfying to know that we didn't just win, we dominated," says Los Angeles forward Rick Fox. "We made the regular season harder than it had to be with our internal problems, but once we found ourselves, there was no stopping this team."

Although the Lakers weren't as spectacular in the Finals as they had been in the first three rounds of the playoffs, their dismantling of the Sixers, especially in Philadelphia, was in its own way equally impressive. The three road victories proved that they could grind it out, that in a series billed as Sixers guts against Lakers glitz, L.A. had both. O'Neal, who averaged 33.0 points, 15.8 rebounds and 4.8 assists in the series, laid waste to the 76ers when they didn't double-team him—Philadelphia center Dikembe Mutombo took more shots to the jaw, courtesy of Shaq, than a bad prizefighter—and passed beautifully out of the pivot when they did. With a pair of championship rings at age 29, O'Neal has the jewelry, the longevity and the talent to join Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on the shortlist of the greatest centers of all time. "I have never seen a better player," says Larry Brown, Philly's 61-year-old coach.

The Finals belonged to O'Neal much as the Western Conference finals against the San Antonio Spurs had belonged to Bryant. Against the Sixers, Bryant found little room to make his acrobatic forays to the rim, so he played with admirable restraint yet still stuffed his stat line: 24.6 points, 7.0 rebounds and 5.8 assists per game. The less-celebrated Lakers, particularly Fox, guard Derek Fisher and forward Robert Horry, took turns demoralizing Philadelphia with three-pointers, and L.A.'s underrated defense made certain that Iverson, who shot only 40.7% in the series, rarely had a view of the basket that wasn't obstructed by at least one outstretched hand. "It's hard to find a single area where they didn't play well," Philly guard Eric Snow said after Game 5. "This is their second championship, and I'm sure they're thinking that it's not their last one."

It is a measure of how limitless the possibilities seem that Bryant, who as a rookie four years ago brashly declared that the Lakers would win 10 titles during his career, was asked during the championship celebration whether he'd like to amend that prediction...upward. He said he'd let his estimate stand.

"I'm greedy," O'Neal says. "I'm very greedy." That greed seems to have been passed on to his teammates. The 15-1 postseason record isn't only a pretty number for the record books, it's also an indication that the Lakers never lost their appetite, even when they had all but devoured the opposition. In each of their four chances to close out a series, they eliminated the opponent with the cold-blooded efficiency that only great teams consistently muster. "If they're not a great team," Sixers forward George Lynch said after Game 5, "then I don't want to run into one that is."

It's no secret that the Lakers' chances of building a dynasty rest on how long this era of good feeling between O'Neal and Bryant lasts. Even in the postclincher giddiness it was hard to find anyone in the Los Angeles locker room who felt sure the two stars had resolved the differences between them, which had fractured the team during most of the regular season. "Hopeful, yes; certain, no," Fox said. "I think it helps that they've seen once again how much we can accomplish when we're all on the same page. But Shaq and Kobe are two strong-willed guys, and there are no guarantees."

Even on the brink of the title, Bryant could muster little more than cautious optimism. "If you look at the teams that have won championships, a lot of them go through some adversity in the regular season," he said the day before Game 5. "We came through it this year even stronger than we were. So I don't see [tension on the team] being a threat at all. But I'll let you know in October." Bryant seemed to be only half joking when he said of his partnership with O'Neal, "We're happy—until next January when people start talking about trading one of us."