"I'd pull him to the sideline and start saying, 'Hey, don't try to do too much yet'"- Phil Jackson on when he realized he couldn't treat Kobe Bryant the same way he did Michael Jordan

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"I'd pull him to the sideline and start saying, 'Hey, don't try to do too much yet'"- Phil Jackson on when he realized he couldn't treat Kobe Bryant the same way he did Michael Jordan originally appeared on Basketball Network.
Phil Jackson's career as an NBA head coach gave him the rare and possibly impossible to replicate task of managing not one, but two fiercely driven superstars with eerily similar skill sets and even more explosive competitive fire.
Hint: they both were glabrous above and stuck their tongue out as adrenaline roared.
However, as the years unfolded and the rings stacked up, Jackson began to understand that similarity in playstyle didn't mean sameness in personality — or coaching approach.
Holding him back
Jackson first arrived in Los Angeles when Kobe Bryant was barely 21. The young guard was already a three-time NBA All-Star, known for his aggressive scoring instincts and almost maniacal obsession with the game.
Phil wasn't walking into a developmental situation; he was walking into a fire that had already been lit. He just had to tone it down a little bit.
"I had a relationship with Kobe that started 21, 20 years of age when I got to the Lakers," Jackson recalled. "And it was like he was there to learn and he was very attentive. When the game started going, I had to kind of hold him back at times, because he would go out and he'd want to get himself in a situation.
"I'd pull him to the sideline and start saying, 'Hey, don't try to do too much yet."
Bryant's will to dominate every second of play was aimed at control. He believed in his ability to bend games to his will and he wanted that responsibility early, every night. Jackson had to temper that instinct without muting it.
A balancing act he hadn't dealt with in quite the same way during Michael Jordan's formative years.
Jackson once famously called Bryant "uncoachable," but it wasn't a slight. It was an acknowledgment of a fundamental truth: The Los Angeles Lakers icon may have mirrored Jordan's game and approach to offense almost to the detail, but internally, he burned with something different — something sharper and more consuming.
Jackson had sculpted the greatest dynasty of the 1990s around Jordan's brilliance. Walking into the Lakers' locker room in 1999 with the triangle offense and Jordan-tested wisdom in hand wasn't a guaranteed formula for control.
And perhaps that was the key difference.
The Chicago Bulls legend had matured into a surgical closer by the time Jackson took over the Bulls in 1989. Bryant, by contrast, was still trying to carve his identity out of the Jordan mold while fighting to assert himself alongside Shaquille O'Neal, one of the most dominant big men in league history.Playing for the system
Jackson's approach to coaching was built around the triangle offense, a system designed to maximize team cohesion and minimize ego-driven, one-on-one play.
Before he arrived in Chicago, Jordan was the best individual player in the league. He had already claimed a Defensive Player of the Year, five scoring titles and an MVP — brilliant, but incomplete as the Bulls were playoff casualties.
Jackson helped him understand that less can lead to more, the same thing he wanted Bryant to learn early on.
"That's one of the reasons I brought Michael and said, 'Wait until the fourth quarter," Jackson said. "Wait until there is a need and the game demonstrates that there is a need for individual action, then go into your game and go into the things you can do well."
It was a system built on trust. Trust the offense. Trust the team. And the moments of brilliance will still find you. Jordan embraced it, even as his scoring average dipped from 37.1 points per game in 1987 to a more sustainable 31.5 by 1992. But those years brought championships — six of them.
Bryant, though, wasn't just trying to win. He was trying to define himself. When Jackson implemented the same structure with the Lakers, he initially chafed. In his eyes, holding back was self-limiting. Phil wanted him to wait for the right moment. Bryant wanted to be in the moment. Still, the system worked. From 2000 to 2002, the Lakers won three straight titles.
Bryant adjusted enough to fit, learned when to dominate and when to defer. But friction remained. Even in later years, when Jackson returned to L.A. in 2005, the tension between Bryant's hyper-focused individuality and Jackson's system-first ideology never fully dissolved. It simply evolved.
By the time Bryant won two more titles in 2009 and 2010, he had fully taken on the closer role Jackson once reserved for Jordan.
But unlike the five-time MVP, Bryant never quite accepted being just a piece of the system. He respected it, but he never surrendered to it. That was the compromise. And it worked.This story was originally reported by Basketball Network on Jul 17, 2025, where it first appeared.