Bryant appeared on O'Neal's podcast, The Big Podcast With Shaq, which will air Monday on PodCastOne.com, and the pair addressed their past head-on.
In an excerpt of the interview provided to Bleacher Report, O'Neal and Bryant both admitted to having regrets about the way their pairing with the Lakers ended.
"A lot of stuff was said out of the heat of the moment," O'Neal said, via Serena Winters of Lakers Nation. "I guarantee I don’t remember a lot of stuff that they said, because I changed my thought process of, you know what, we won three out of four, what the hell are you all talking about, this is not really even a story."
Bryant and O'Neal were teammates from 1996-2004 in Los Angeles, emerging as the NBA's premier duo in that time. They won three consecutive championships from 2000-02 and reached a fourth NBA Finals during their final campaign together in 2003-04. Their rise to prominence was fraught with internal turmoil, however, as O'Neal and Bryant fought one another tooth and nail late in the former's tenure.
Bryant commented on the public nature of their feud:
Here’s the thing though, when you say it at the time you actually mean it and then when you get older you have more perspective and you’re like holy s—t, I was an idiot when I was a kid. To me, the most important thing was really just keep your mouth shut. You don’t need to go to the press with stuff. You keep it internal and we have our arguments and our disagreements, but I think having our debates within the press was something I wish would’ve been avoided, but it did kind of create this whirlwind around us as a team with myself and Shaq and ...
Article Source: Bleacher Report - Los Angeles Lakers
