Shaquille O’Neal broke things.
There were the multiple opponents at a championship level. There was his own team at a championship level. There were the basket stanchions, with him re-shaping steel as if creating balloon animals. More basket stanchions. Even his reputation. There were times O’Neal mangled that, too.
Twisted wreckage everywhere on the road to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame as part of the Class of 2016 set to be inducted Sept. 9. But what a spectacular sight it is, the very core of the career that sets him apart from other greats in basketball history and certainly from among contemporaries. Undeniably unique in play and personality, Shaq was, for better or worse, and sometimes both, about destruction.
He helped ruin at least two opponents, when the Los Angeles Lakers drove the Portland Trail Blazers and Sacramento Kings so far into the ground in classic Game 7s of Western Conference finals that neither got back up. Portland went from 15 points ahead in the fourth quarter in 2000 to a shocking elimination, with an O’Neal dunk off a lob from Kobe Bryant as the lasting image. The Blazers didn’t win another playoff series for 14 years. Sacramento got into the final period in 2002 as well, lost as well and likewise were never a contender again, O’Neal mocking the “Queens” as he stomped to 30.3 points and 13.6 rebounds.
The Dallas Mavericks don’t make the same misery index for The 2006 Finals against Shaq, Dwyane Wade and the Miami Heat because Dallas was not permanently disfigured like the Kings and the Trail Blazers. But Miami did deliver the special pain of turning an 0-2 deficit into a 4-2 win as Wade starred and 33-year-old O’Neal averaged 13.7 points and 10.2 rebounds while shooting 60.7 percent. The Mavs came back to beat the Heat for the 2011 title, when O’Neal was in Boston playing the last of his 19 seasons.
And the Lakers themselves, of course.
Ka. Boom.
It was a hugely successful run, except that it was also a letdown because the Lakers could have been more than three-time champions, a strange, but true, perspective that dominating the time could also include so much disappointment. But the Lakers’ two stars were often locked in mortal battle, and so there went the chance for a real dynasty. It ended because the locker room was not big enough for O’Neal and Bryant to co-exist.
Shaq in his prime, especially in the Los Angeles years, was pure weaponry. He was a worker and, worst of all for opponents, looking for reasons to work more. He would seize on slights, even if it meant making them up the way a lot of stars do to create motivation except that O’Neal was a Hall of Famer in generating fiction (more bluntly: he could be a serial liar) and carrying grudges.
He relished big games in a center showdown against David Robinson because, O’Neal explained, Robinson had once dissed an autograph request from a young Shaq living in San Antonio. Who knows if it ever really happened — “The Admiral” was about the nicest guy to ever walk a court, so it’s reasonable to say there had to be a good reason if, in fact, he did decline — but O’Neal insisted he was intent on destroying. He, too, would forever hold on to the perceived slight of missing by one vote the chance to be a unanimous MVP in 2000.
O’Neal losing that commitment to conditioning over time became a central point of the conflict with Bryant, first simmering behind the scenes and later a weapon of choice for Kobe was the feud went public. Bryant was a lot of things, but unprepared was never one of them, whether it was devouring scouting reports and watching videos of opponents from his first days as a pro or in the monastic approach to working out. Shaq’s lack of dedication to staying in shape became harder to tolerate with each season. Injuries took their toll. But as much as O’Neal was a hulking destructive force with the Magic, Lakers, Heat, Suns, Cavaliers and Celtics, he was also someone who did not max out his potential.
“Shaq, I think had he had the same focus as Kobe could have been the best ever,” said Del Harris, the L.A. coach the first two-plus seasons of the Bryant-O’Neal pairing. “I really think he had those capabilities. However, his personality being as it was really gave him a breadth of personality and everything that has really stood him well. The guy can do anything. He’s a natural comedian. He’s a natural actor. He’s smart. And he had a wonderful career. Four championships.
“I’d say looking back on this, though, and I wrote this in my book ‘On Point’ that I believed if somehow he and Kobe could have formed a similar relationship that Magic [Johnson] and Kareem [Abdul-Jabbar] had that they would have won any number of championships. I don’t know that number, but it was more than four. They won three together and three more separately. That’s six and I’ve got to think that they would have won six, seven, eight (together). I really don’t know who would have stopped them. They were that good….”
And still O’Neal averaged 23.7 points (even with 12 and 9.2 the final two seasons), 10.9 rebounds (despite 4.9 and 3.5, respectively, those years in Cleveland and Boston) and shot 58.2 percent while leading the league in field-goal percentage 10 times, including one stretch of eight out of 10 years. He was an All-Star 15 times, a Rookie of the Year, a Finals MVP in each of the three L.A. titles, a four-time champion in all once he tacked on the Miami ring, and a two-time All-America at LSU. Only six NBA players totaled more points, and only 13 had more rebounds.
“The only thing I left behind is missing all those games because of injuries and missing all the free throws,” O’Neal said. “The way it played out was the way it was supposed to play out. I was always one of those guys who always thought and tried to be in control, so everything that was done I knew it was going to happen and I controlled the situation. Like when I got traded from the Lakers, I knew that was coming.”
He was oversized in every way — physique (7-foot-1 and a listed 325 pounds, more of a suggestion many months per season later in the career while he worked into playoff shape), production and attitude. There hasn’t been anyone like him, that hulking and that much of a goof, with his post-retirement work on TNT an accurate description of O’Neal as a player. It’s the same Shaq who would approach a reporter before a game, flip the guy sideways as the world turned a new direction, and woosh! Straight into a standing military press. Then a quick descent to Earth’s atmosphere and O’Neal walking away.
His antics were endearing and joyous when life was good around the Lakers but straight immaturity when tensions became all too common, with Bryant and a lot of other days, like when he would run down court shouting at owner Jerry Buss during a game for a raise. The act wore thin. Yet in the sign of talent, there would be interested suitors once L.A. broke up with him in 2004 and then once the Heat reached the same conclusion in 2008, when O’Neal was still a productive complementary player.
His was that much of a pendulum of a career in most every way, even the challenge of refereeing. Shaq’s games were a nightly demolition derby, constant giving contact as he put his shoulder down to bulldoze to the basket and constant receiving contact as the Lilliputians tried to corral Gulliver. More than one coach would come to conclude that no matter what the stats said, no one was fouled more and no one did more fouling. It would have been impossible to call everything.
He led the league in free-throw attempts six times and finished second or third on five other occasions not simply because opponents intentionally fouled the guy who would finish a career 52.7 percent from the line. It was 19 seasons of trying to do something, anything, to keep another basket stanchion out of traction.
“I want to be remembered as one of the most dominant players to ever play the game,” he said. “The word ‘best’ is thrown around a lot, especially these days with the social media, but ‘most dominant’ is not really thrown around a lot. There are only two guys that really, really dominated the league. Wilt was one and I think I was the other, and that time was good enough for me.
“Just coming in, being able to make an immediate impact, doing it my way, having a couple controversial endings in certain places but still being able to make a lot of noise and win when a lot of people didn’t expect us to win. The way I came in, the way I ended is storybook. First pick, almost made it (to the title with the Magic), starts all over, goes to another team, has problems, Zen Master comes in, and wins three in a row. Young prince wants to take out the young king, they kill him, but they didn’t kill him. He was found on the shore of Miami by another king of the East, Pat Riley, he wins again, and then has problems, he gets traded, traded, traded, he’s getting older, and then he has a career-ending injury. It’s like a book. An excellent book at that.”
Now O’Neal goes to Springfield as a first-ballot Hall of Famer in a way that a small percentage of players in league history deserve the additional distinction of enshrinement at the earliest opportunity. He dominated inside, was a centerpiece of teams that turned opponents to dust, had a personality constantly turned to full blast, and put up historically good numbers.
He was that one of a kind. He was that much of a force.
