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Sizing up Shaq Yes, he's huge, but don't ignore O'Neal's skillsPosted: Wednesday June 12, 2002 12:00 PM
Those remarks, and various others made over the last few months, made me realize what an issue O'Neal's size is, how almost every day of his life since he was five or six years old (he says he was the biggest kid around even then) he's had to deal with being larger than everyone else. I'm not going to go so far as to say I feel sorry for him; obviously, his dimensions (7-foot-1, somewhere between 345 and 380 pounds, depending on whom you believe) have something to do with his being where he is, which is, at this writing, on the verge of winning a third straight NBA championship. But Shaq is so large and so dominating and so relentless in throwing his weight around, that, to many, his size is the only reason he's successful. That simply is not fair. He is graceful and agile, smart and savvy, talented and tough. Somebody told me once that there are more than 1,000,000 seven-footers in the world; only one of them is currently dominating the NBA Finals. Basketball people, of course, know how good Shaq is. The comparison that comes up most often is Wilt Chamberlain, who in his day was also described as a freak of nature who dominated solely because of his size and strength. (Kobe Bryant, incidentally, gave O'Neal the nickname Wilt Chamberneezy; Shaq had it printed on a baseball cap.) It is heresy in some quarters to suggest that Shaq measures up to a man who in the 1961-'62 season averaged an unimaginable 50.4 points per game. But it's becoming less so, and it's not only contemporary chroniclers who find O'Neal as formidable as The Big Dipper. "People think it's all power with Shaq, but they're wrong," says 86-year-old Pete Newell, the big-man guru who coached against Wilt and who schooled Shaq at his offseason camp in the early '90s. "Here's what I've seen [O'Neal] do in one game: Bank off the glass. Little lob hook in the paint. Step-back move on the baseline. Quick spin move when he comes out on the other side to shoot. And a neat step-through move when he was doubled or tripled. You go over the history of centers and can you remember anyone, except maybe Hakeem Olajuwon, showing all that? And Hakeem didn't have the power game. I don't like to rate players according to who's best, but none of the great centers had Shaq's moves and counters, and none of them, including Wilt, had his strength." Newell also takes to task the notion that Shaq is so good mainly because he has Bryant as a teammate. (The same theory is offered about Bryant, of course.) "Do you think Bill Russell didn't have great players around him?" asks Newell, who goes through the litany of Russell's great Boston Celtics teammates such as Bob Cousy, Bill Sharman, Sam Jones, K.C. Jones, Tommy Heinsohn. "Wilt played with a lot of great players. [Hal Greer, Billy Cunningham, Lucious Jackson in Philadelphia, and some guys named West, Baylor and Goodrich on the Lakers.] Kareem had Oscar Robertson in Milwaukee and some fairly good guys later in his career in L.A. [Magic Johnson, James Worthy, Byron Scott, etc.] Great centers usually have great teammates, but it's partly because they make those teammates better." Well, I'll bow, as I always do, to Newell's expertise. I do know that O'Neal has shown far more basketball acumen throughout these playoffs than he ever has before. Obviously, he has a power game, but in this postseason he's shown three other things, too: He has increased the range on his fallaway bank shot, he has shown (unlike many frontcourtmen) that he is comfortable setting up on either side of the block, and he passes out of a double- (and triple-) team as well as any center in the league. All that, and he got my face into a lot of newspapers. Sports Illustrated senior writer Jack McCallum covers the NBA beat for the magazine and is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com |
