Doctor MJ wrote:Accidentally posted this on the last thread, so re-posting it here:
A note on Shaq in comparison to Magic with both playing a bunch of great teams, and Shaq playing longer:
First I think everyone needs to consider for themselves the negative effects of Shaq's tendency to blow things up as soon as he got jealous of his co-star...which happened everywhere he went during his prime. I've long said the choice between drafting Shaq & Duncan is no choice at all. One guy gives you a chance to build a sustainably great culture, one guy just can't help but become dissatisfied even when his team is winning titles.
This just doesn't seem like an accurate assessment based on everything I know. I don't think he ever left a team because he was jealous of anyone.
He left Orlando because they lowballed him. Unrestricted Free Agency was instituted in 1988 and 1996 was the NBA's first big FA summer. Mourning and Howard got these huge contracts, and while what Orlando offered Shaq was comparable to what they got, it was still less. It's true that Shaq also had eyes on LA because of off-court interests there, but I still think it's very possible he stays if Orlando doesn't make one of the dumbest front office mistakes of all-time in LOW-BALLING ABOUT-TO-BE-PRIME SHAQ.
He left the Lakers for two reasons.
First, he was looking for an extension the Lakers didn't want to give in 2004. He signed a 7-year deal in 1996, and a three-year extension to that in 2000, so in the summer of 2004 he had two years left, and he wanted another deal locked up. I guess Dr. Buss was hesitant because he wasn't sure Shaq was going to be worth the money anymore.
Second, Kobe was UFA that summer and it seems pretty obvious that Kobe was not going to re-sign there unless Shaq was gone. Kobe has said this himself.
Between the disagreement about the extension and the threat of losing Kobe, it was Dr. Buss that made the decision to move on from Shaq. Shaq never decided to leave the Lakers. (And Miami gave Shaq his five year, hundred million dollar extension the following Summer after their 2005 ECF appearance.)
He wanted out of Miami because the team had fallen apart. They were, apart from Wade, an old team when they won in 2006 and an older team when they got swept in 2007. Miami blew that whole team up and essentially started over with Wade, and Shaq spent his twilight years ring-chasing with Nash, LeBron, and KG.
So you have the Orlando front office being dumb, a Kobe ultimatum, and Shaq not wanting to be part of a rebuild in his later years.
Beyond that, while +/- data initially painted Shaq in a very positive light for me, it became a little bit less impressive.
First, there's the matter that Penny Hardaway actually looks more impactful than Shaq once Penny comes into his own in Orlando. In both '94-95 and '95-96, Penny has a higher raw +/- than Shaq.
In 1995-96, Shaq's final season there, Orlando's SRS was 5.40 and their Net Rtg was +6.0. In 1996-97 - and Penny did play 59 games - Orlando's SRS was -0.07 and their Net Rtg was -0.4. They fell from 5th place to 16th place in both categories. I understand what the on/off data you cited says, but I've never seen anyone suggest that Shaq wasn't clearly the #1 guy on those teams.
Second, there's the matter that when Shaq hits certain matchups, it's like kryptonite. The best OnCourt +/- per 100 rate of his career comes in '97-98 where the only reason his team doesn't have HCA throughout the playoffs is because of the time Shaq missed (22 games, more than 1/4th of the season). Without realizing this, one might think a 61 win Laker team losing to a 62 win Jazz team in a sweep is embarrassing but really in essence just what we'd expect...but really the Lakers were the superior regular season team when they had Shaq, and so this is effectively Shaq's team getting upset in a sweep.
Here's how the Jazz ORtg looked in their 4 series that year:
Rockets 103.7
Spurs 101.5
Lakers 116.1
Bulls 96.1
See the problem? The Jazz have long been criticized as having an amazing regular season offense that ran into trouble when they played serious playoff defenses. In '97-98, they got held WAY under their 112.7 best-in-league regular season ORtg by all of their opponents except Shaq's Lakers, where they did better than they did in their best-in-league levels.
This despite the fact that the Lakers had an above average NBA defense, and were even better in the time they had him out there. It was an epic drop off in effectiveness the Lakers had in the face of the Sloan offense, and it was Shaq's mobility vulnerability was certainly part of the equation.
This is a convincing argument that Shaq's Lakers had one bad series.
This was part of a broader trend where Shaq's teams tended to lose in sweeps. I wouldn't say it was always about his defensive vulnerabilities, but I also think that it's hard not to think Shaq being such an extreme body had something to do with it. If you could handle Shaq...you handled him and tended to win fairly easily.
Yeah, but a lot of those need context.
In the 1996 ECF, his team was hit hard by injuries. Horace Grant, their #3 guy, went down in Game 1 and missed the rest of the series. That was the big loss, but in addition to that Nick Anderson, their starting SG, missed a game, and Brian Shaw, a key bench piece, missed two games. All this while going up against the 1996 Bulls, a first-ballot greatest-team-ever contender.
In the 1999 second round, the Lakers were swept by the eventual champion Spurs. In the history of the NBA, I'm not sure there's a frontcourt better-equipped to beat a Shaq-led team than the 1999 Spurs with already-looks-prime-in-his-second-year Duncan and still-80%-of-his-prime Robinson. He got swept by one of the greatest defensive frontcourts that ever played the game.
In the 2007 first round, it was an old Heat team and Shaq's time as an impact player was winding down. There's a reason they pretty much got of everyone not named Wade(or Haslem) the following season. Not fair to blame him when he really wasn't prime anymore and the team around him outside of Wade wasn't doing much.
The 1995 Finals don't look good, I'll give you that, but still, he was being guarded by the guy just voted #6 all-time in this project(even though I really don't agree with that), who clearly was a GOAT-tier defender and in the midst of an all-time run himself.
All of this then contributed to Shaq doing surprisingly poorly in my last run year-by-year run through.
The only times where I rated Shaq as having a Top 5 season were:
'94-95
'97-98
'99-00
'00-01
'01-02
I think it's worth others exploring the same thing. My guess is that most would end up being more charitable to Shaq than I was, but remember when comparing him to a guy like Magic who was having Top 5 seasons as a matter of course all through his career when healthy and did so with a massively positive effect on his teammates rather than an eventually-negative effect on them.
It also means, I actually think Shaq vs Kobe is actually a pretty good debate (Kobe clocks in with 7 Top 5 seasons for me).
I will respectfully disagree and say that Shaq is clearly, without any question, a more impactful player than Kobe.
