Shaquille O’Neal was an absolute monster during his prime in the NBA. This is a man who got drafted in 1992 and was named one of the 50 greatest players in NBA history in 1996. Shaq’s impact on the league was instant and lasted for a very long time, especially during the Lakers’ 3-peat era.
The final championship of that era in came in 2002 when the Lakers swept the New Jersey Nets in the Finals. Shaquille O’Neal had one of the most dominant 4 game-stretches we have ever seen in the league. In that series, there’s an iconic picture of Shaq dunking over all 5 Nets’ players under the basket. One of those players, Kenyon Martin, called that the greatest still shot in sports history on All The Smoke.
“That’s one of the greatest pictures in sports history. Still shots? That is one of the best pictures ever.”
“I was the one where I was the double guy because fit wise, I couldn’t do what they could do. If I did get caught on him, all I had to do was try and front him and he just pushed me up the lane. Impossible to guard. You pick you poison. Do you want to try and play him straight up? You know what he gonna do. Do you double? You got that other animal (Kobe) who’d destroy you one-on-one, destroyed us. Shaq averaging 36 and he averaged like 26, it was impossible.”
What Shaq and Kobe Bryant achieved in 2002 seemed to prove that they will be dominant for many more years. However, that was their final championship as teammates before splitting up after losing in the 2004 NBA Finals.
Shaquille O’Neal In The 2002 Finals
O’Neal averaged 36.3 points, 12.3 rebounds, 3.8 assists, and 2.8 blocks in those Finals and won a dominant third consecutive Finals MVP, becoming only the second person in NBA history to have done it after Michael Jordan.
Shaq has since said that he found the series boring because the result was obvious to most from before a ball was even tipped. It’s funny he said that the series was boring, especially when Nets fans came to the arena with bricks to mock Shaq’s inability to convert free throws. That was the high point of the early-2000s Lakers dynasty, as everything went downhill after.
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