2000 NBA Finals
2000 basketball championship series
The 2000 NBA Finals was the championship series of the National Basketball Association's (NBA) 1999–2000 season, and the conclusion of the season's playoffs. The series was played under a best-of-seven format, with the Lakers holding home court advantage. The series featured the number one seeds from both conferences. The Western Conference champion Los Angeles Lakers defeated the Eastern Conference champion Indiana Pacers in six games to win their first NBA championship since 1988 and their twelfth overall.
This marked Indiana's first NBA Finals appearance. The Pacers would not return to the NBA Finals until 2025. Lakers center Shaquille O'Neal was named the NBA Finals Most Valuable Player (MVP) of the series, his first of three consecutive honors, in arguably one of the greatest NBA Finals performances in history, putting up 38.0 points, 16.7 rebounds, and 2.7 blocks per game.
Background
Los Angeles Lakers
Although the Lakers were one of the more talented teams in the NBA the previous year, they failed to win a single game against the San Antonio Spurs in the 1999 NBA playoffs. Twenty-four days after being swept by the eventual league champion, the Lakers signed Phil Jackson as head coach. Jackson, famous for coaching Michael Jordan and the six-time champion Chicago Bulls, would build his triangle offense around Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4597667. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2000, 1999, 1988 and 2025.
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This entry incorporates text from “2000 NBA Finals” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.