Kobe Bryant's Best Teammates Throughout His NBA Career

Shaq is one of the greatest basketball players and centers of all time. After four years with the Magic, O'Neal signed as a free agent with the Los Angeles Lakers, who had just drafted a rookie shooting guard named Kobe Bryant. Together, the dynamic duo won three consecutive championships in 2000, 2001, and 2002. In all of which, Shaq earned NBA Finals MVP. Shaq was a 15x All Star, 8x All-NBA First Team, and won MVP of the league in 2000. His number 34 is retired by Los Angeles Lakers.

Gasol is regarded as one of the greatest power forwards and also one of the greatest European players of all time. He was the first non-American player to win Rookie of the Year. He was a six-time NBA All-Star and a four-time All-NBA team selection. He won two NBA championships, both with the Los Angeles Lakers back-to-back in 2009 and 2010.

Odom spent seven seasons with the Lakers, as part of a dominant unit at the turn of the decade that  won NBA championships in 2009 and 2010. Odom played primarily off the bench as the sixth man, backing up the Lakers' frontcourt consisting of Gasol, Bynum, and Trevor Ariza. In 2011, meeting the requirement to come in as a reserve more games than he started, Odom was awarded the NBA Sixth Man of the Year Award, becoming the first player in Lakers history to do so. Kobe called it Odom's most “consistent season.”

Selected by the Lakers in the first round of the 1996 NBA draft, Fisher spent his first eight seasons with the franchise, winning three consecutive championships (2000–2002) with teammates Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal and coach Phil Jackson. Although it didn't lead to a fourth NBA title, Fisher is famously known for his “0.4 shot”, in which he scored a game winning basket versus the Spurs in the fewest amount of time left on the clock possible. 

Horry played 16 seasons in the NBA, winning seven championships, the most of any player not to have played for the Boston Celtics. He is one of only four players to have won NBA championships with three teams; he won two with the Houston Rockets, three with the Los Angeles Lakers and two with the San Antonio Spurs with no defeats in NBA Finals. He earned the nickname "Big Shot Rob", because of his clutch shooting in important games, and he is widely considered to be one of the greatest clutch performers and winners in NBA history.

The original Dwight Howard experiment in L.A. did not work out, after the All Star center was traded from Orlando. Howard missed games due to a recurring shoulder injury, and he was upset that he was not getting the ball enough, and he felt that Kobe Bryant was shooting too much. Howard finished the season with his lowest scoring average since his second year in the NBA, but he was the league leader in rebounding and ranked second in field goal percentage, good enough to earn him All-NBA Third Team. After the season, Howard moved on and joined James Harden in Houston.