Hall of Famer Shaquille O’Neal has gone down as the most dominant player in modern NBA history, but even he found some eras to be more challenging than others. During the latest episode of The Big Podcast with Shaq, former NBA player Brandon Jennings asked O’Neal to name the era in which defenses gave him some trouble.
“That’s a really unfair question because nobody ever really played me straight up,” O’Neal said. “But to answer [your question], the 2000s, when they created the ‘Shaq Rules,’ when you can do the front and back, it got difficult for a while. As a guard, they just teach you to do this in high school, throw it in the post.
“But with a guy in front of you, I really couldn’t get the ball a lot,” O’Neal stated. “That’s why I was trying to be a runner and be the first guy out. But when I first came in, it was tough. It was the end of that ‘Bad Boy’ era. The Knicks would f*** you up. Detroit will still f*** you up. All the teams had respectable big guys.
“I was telling somebody the other day, Rik Smits used to embarrass me when we played Indiana,” O’Neal continued. “I couldn’t do nothing with them, yeah. And then after he went out, then it was big country. Then, after I killed most of the guys off, Hakeem [Olajuwon] was the last one to give me work.
“I repaid him back but he was older, it didn’t count,” O’Neal added. “I got [David] Robinson out of there, I got [Patrick] Ewing out of there, I got Hakeem out of there. Then it was just pretty much me. I ain’t really have a lot of competition, especially in the West… To answer your question, the end of the 90s was the toughest for me going into the early 2000s when they changed the defense.”
O’Neal did acknowledge that Tim Duncan was a problem once all those other bigs were out of the way. He admitted that Duncan and Hakeem Olajuwon were the two whom he could never break.
While O’Neal called the early 2000s a tough era for him, that was when he was at his dominant best. He led the Los Angeles Lakers to a historic three-peat from 2000 to 2002.
O’Neal averaged 35.9 points on 59.5% shooting from the field in those three Finals series, as teams just had no answer for him. He would also win his first and only MVP award in 2000 by averaging 29.7 points, 13.6 rebounds, 3.8 assists, 0.5 steals, and 3.0 blocks per game.
Such was O’Neal’s dominance that teams had to go away from conventional strategies to find a way to beat his teams. Mike D’Antoni introduced the “seven seconds or less” offense with the Phoenix Suns in the early 2000s, and that was done with the big man in mind.
D’Antoni stated that O’Neal is responsible for the three-point revolution. He knew you couldn’t beat fire with fire, and so, the solution was to push the pace and take more three-pointers. It speaks to your greatness as a player when the opposition has to think outside the box to try to get the better of you.
