Scottie Pippen calls Phil Jackson a ‘racist’ who tried to ‘expose’ Kobe

Scottie Pippen has made the rounds in the NBA news for the last few days. After going back and forth on social media with Kevin Durant, he drops a bombshell that Phil Jackson disrespected and insulted him in a playoff game back in 1994. Scottie then doubled down and called the Zen Master a ‘racist’. 

Lake Show Life investigates from all sides and provides an opinion of where all of this came from.

Scottie Pippen is an NBA Hall of Famer and Chicago Bulls legend. Up until ESPN’s documentary, “The Last Dance” covering Michael Jordan’s last season in a Chicago uniform in 1998, Pippen was sitting pretty next to his “Airness” as a six-time champion.

Since the documentary aired, Pippen has not been happy with the way he was portrayed. Everyone had their perceptions of the documentary including Lake Show Life while the NBA shutdown was going on.

• The Last Dance: LeBron fans, do us a favor and don’t make it about him
• Los Angeles Lakers: Why Shaquille O’Neal is wrong about the Bulls
• LeBron James: Could he survive Dennis Rodman and the Bad Boys?
• The Last Dance: Did a Laker keep Isiah Thomas off the Dream Team?

Scottie has gone the “Kwame Brown” route and has unloaded when it comes to his feelings about the past. It all came to a head when he relived his infamous decision to take himself out of a 1994 playoff game on the Dan Patrick Show this week.

In the interview with Patrick, Pippen doubled down on his quotes with GQ, that head coach Phil Jackson drawing up the game-winning shot for Toni Kukoc made him feel insulted and disrespected. But to really set things off, he said that he felt that Jackson denying him the final shot was a “racial move.”

Then after Pippen’s statement that he had no issues calling Jackson a racist, he used Phil’s tenure as Los Angeles Lakers head coach for justification. Scottie noted Jackson’s relationship with Kobe Bryant as an example of how he took advantage of Black players via Yahoo! Sports.

Here’s the timeline of Jackson and his relationship with Kobe.

• Jackson coached Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers from 1999 to 2004, winning three NBA titles in four NBA Finals appearances.
• After the Finals loss to the Detroit Pistons, Jackson left the team and penned “The Last Season: A Team in Search of Its Soul,” a documentary about the tumultuous 2003-2004 Lakers seasons.
• The book was very critical of Bryant calling him “uncoachable”.
• Jackson then returned as head coach in 2005 and coached Bryant to two more NBA titles. 

The question here is Scottie Pippen’s motive. Why is this such a problem to bring up a 25-year memory that most people have moved on from? Why not be happy with a legacy of being one of the NBA’s 50 greatest players with six rings? To his credit, Scottie did take to Twitter to make a statement about the upcoming media attention that he knew would be negative.

Well, Lake Show Life is the Lakers website trollers might not want to challenge about digging deep and researching subjects. We love you too Scottie!

Lake Show Life is doing a special report breaking down this situation.

• First, we will go back to 1994 to the play in question and discuss a quote where Pippen took a personal shot at Michael Jordan.
• Kevin Durant’s involvement after Scottie’s comparison with LeBron James. 
• His relationship with Kobe Bryant in the early 2000s.
• Finally, our opinion on Pippen’s motivation and a lot more.   

There’s a lot to unpack so let’s go back to 1994.