Daddy 801 wrote:Shaq would be even more dominate. Which is absurd to think about.
I figure he'd be about the same, just tweaking the how. Orlando-era body with three-peat-era spacing. Worse on defense, because he was never a good PnR defender and wasn't awesome at getting out in space and dealing with lateral mobility, but still a pretty good rim protector and obviously as a defensive rebounder. And what he'd lose in terms of relative efficiency he'd probably gain at least most of it back passing out to shooters.
The interesting thing to ponder is if he would develop more of a face-up game like Giannis. Tough to project, but Shaq always had more handle than a lot of people realized and it would have totally changed the dynamics of his game.
As ever, though, his brutal FT shooting would be an impediment to his scoring. More so in this era, because average efficiency is so much higher. Shaq was a 52.7% FT shooter on his career, which is around 16% worse than Giannis' career average, and would be a rather weighty anchor on his overall efficiency. Now, you can assume he'd get some easier looks inside with the way spacing and interior defense work today. He was a roughly 58% shooter inside the arc most of his career and even shot 60% in his second season (so, Orlando era, high volume, etc). That's about 4% better than Embiid and about 3% worse than Jokic. In tracked seasons, Shaq posted a little over 43% from 3-10 feet, more like 44-45% when you go back to the late 90s and early 2000s. So let's split the difference and say he averages something like 60% because he gets more shots at the rim and wasn't an ATG stunner with his short hooks.
So let's say you play him 35 mpg, and you manage to get him 18 FGA/g inside the arc. Tough to find him those extra shots because he had no range to speak of, but he ran well in transition and made extra shots for himself on the offensive glass. Let's even call that a good year, so let's call that 61.1% from the field (11/18). Shaq was a .578 FTr guy in his career, bolstered as his volume came down after 2003, but still like .54 ish during his hey day. So let's call that .55. And then let's take the 59.2% Shaq shot at the line as a rookie, for funzies.
So you're looking at about 27.9 ppg on about 62.3% TS, which would be considerably less dominant in terms of his scoring output than he was in his day, because of the closed gap in efficiency relative to the rest of the league. It is worth remembering that from 93-03, Shaq was a 111 TS+ guy. 60% TS last year was 104 TS+. Shaq would have had to move big things in his ability to make shots to catch up to what he'd been doing relative to his peers in his own era. In 2024, Jokic was at 65% TS, and that brought him to 112 TS+. This year, his 66.3% TS was 115. But he also shoots about as well as Shaq's career FG% strictly from 3-10 feet, and has shot 60.5% or better from there in 4 straight seasons. That's not something Shaq would be doing, so every time he had to take a shot away from the rim, Diesel would be eroding his efficiency.
Now, there's a bunch of ways you can look at how those numbers might change. And it's worth remembering that his impact would still be huge, because he was a 300-pound behemoth floating around the interior with quickness. He moved well off-ball, you were super done once he got a seal if he was able to receive a pass and Shaq was a good, if not ground-breaking, passer from the post. Like, not Jokic or anything, but he played post/re-post well and wasn't sticky with the ball if there was a good option. And if you have a stretch 4 opening things up for him and everyone else is effectively drawing a defender away from him, he becomes very, very difficult to guard for most players, for sure.
And again, the next factor is, if you sell out to shade and double and swarm so that he either can't get the post entry pass or can't get the catch, he'll have a field day with shooters. Now if you watched how OKC handled Jokic (who is abut 280 lbs) whenever he got a foot near the foul line, you get a starting point for how teams would be playing Shaq. O'neal would be trying to cut around the paint, looking for a deep seal, but he'd need a perimeter guy with good post entry passing skills to overcome a really good D. The farther out the catch, the less likely Shaq was going to hurt you with his best stuff. He had some tricky footwork and he could pivot and duck under and all that stuff, so you'd generally see him taking those 6- and 8-footers and stuff, not a lot of shots from 10 feet.
At some point, you figure like 04 Detroit did: "we can't REALLY stop him, so we need to limit his touches and stop everyone else, and not foul him too much." And so they did. That worked out pretty well for them. Shaq was older then, of course. Larger, less mobile, and the team chemistry on those Lakers was awful. Plus they didn't have Horry.
But yeah. I figure about the same, just shifting the method around a little. He'd have to play more as he did in Orlando, and he'd probably end up more like a 4 or 5 apg player in this environment. Wouldn't see 30 ppg from him, the same as we didn't in his own time, but he'd still be a huge positive on offense.
