Shaquille O’Neal has gone down as one of the NBA’s all-time greats but there were teams that gave even someone like him a lot of trouble. On the latest episode of The Big Podcast with Shaq, O’Neal was asked which was the hardest team for him to play against and went with the Karl Malone and John Stockton-led Utah Jazz.
“Actually Utah,” O’Neal said. “Because John Stockton and Karl Malone pick-and-roll, the most unstoppable play. They got all the calls in Utah.”
O’Neal also hilariously revealed that the lack of nightlife in Utah made it difficult for him to dominate on the court.
“And then there was no nightlife,” O’Neal stated. “I had to… not go out, but just be out. If I go to the room and stay in the room all day, I was going to have a terrible game. I need to hit the club, the hookah bar, or something. But Utah, there ain’t s*** to do in Utah, so I would always have a terrible game.”
I am not sure how much that impacted O’Neal, but there is no denying that he was not at his best he had to play in Utah during his career. He played a total of 28 games there in the regular season and playoffs and averaged 22.0 points, 9.9 rebounds, 2.0 assists, 0.8 steals, and 2.4 blocks per game while shooting 49.9% from the field.
That shooting percentage was O’Neal’s lowest on the road against any team while the scoring average ranked 20th. He just didn’t enjoy his time on the court there, especially when Malone and Stockton were around.
When O’Neal joined the Los Angeles Lakers in 1996, the Malone-Stockton Jazz were one of the powerhouses in the Western Conference. The two teams would face off in the playoffs in his very first season and it was a no contest.
The Jazz dismantled the Lakers in five games in the Conference Semifinals in 1997. O’Neal had averaged 26.2 points per game in the 1996-97 season and 33.0 points per game in the first-round series against the Portland Trail Blazers but put up just 22.0 points per game against the Jazz.
The teams then met in the postseason again the following year, this time in the Conference Finals. Unfortunately for the Lakers, the second playoff meeting turned out to be worse than the first, as the Jazz swept them. To his credit, O’Neal did average 31.8 points per game in that series, but it wasn’t enough to win even one game.
O’Neal would never get to play against the Jazz in the playoffs after that, which meant his record against them stands at 1-8. The win rate of 11.1% is his lowest by far against any team, with a rate of 48.0% against the Chicago Bulls being the second-lowest.
O’Neal did at least have some success against the Jazz in the regular season when Stockton and Malone were around. The duo was together in Utah up to the 2002-03 season and he had amassed a 19-14 record against the team by that point. While that’s a respectable record, he just couldn’t beat them when it really mattered.
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