Shaq HOF

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Laker Film Room: Greatest Lakers Games - Shaq in 2001 NBA Finals Game 2

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Joey Ramirez

On a night celebrating one of the greatest basketball players of all-time, an outpouring of congratulations was offered to Shaquille O’Neal by those inside and outside of the sport.

Some of his top influences were chosen to speak in a pre-recorded segment that played before his enshrinement speech.

Dale Brown
“Every year at LSU, he got better. He didn’t want to be good. He wanted to be great.”

David Robinson
“When Shaq came into the league, he had such a great passion and enthusiasm for the game. With his size and strength and mobility, it was something that we really hadn’t seen.”

Alonzo Mourning
“He’s huge. He’s menacing. And he really just attacked the rim.”

Magic Johnson
 “He really just took the league by storm, but he did it in Shaquille O’Neal style. He was just as big off the court as he was on the court. When he went from Orlando to the Lakers, L.A. just loved him.”

“There will never be anybody like Shaquille O’Neal, ever. It won’t even be close.”

Kobe Bryant
 “He’s this funny, jovial guy. But in between those lines, he’s not playing around. He played with such a viciousness. I watched him put centers to shame.”

“We put L.A. back on the map and brought that belief back to Los Angeles that we’re playing for titles and nothing else.”

Phil Jackson
“Shaq brought a whole different element to basketball. He was going to be the dominant initial force that we had. He took on the mantle of: ‘We have to win. Now’s the time to win.’”

“In the history of big men, he’s right in that handful of greatest centers ever.”

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Shaquille is one of the great players of all-time. Over a 10-year period, he was the best center in the league. That is absolutely a mark of greatness.

In addition, O’Neal received acclaim from a pair of his fellow members of the 2016 Hall of Fame class who had their share of battles against the Big Fella.

Yao Ming
“A great athlete not only has great teammates, but also great opponents. A great opponent pushed me (and) pushed us forward — great opponents like Shaquille O’Neal. Every game we played reminded me of the old saying that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

Allen Iverson
“I can’t leave without bringing up Shaq. I love him so much as a person. Obviously the most dominant big man we’ve ever seen, ever.”

And, of course, O’Neal received a constant stream of praise on social media:

shaqs-peers-friends-and-more-pay-tribute-on-induction-night

Shaq's Peers, Friends and More Pay Tribute On Induction Night

When Shaquille O’Neal was a boy, his stepfather, Sgt. Phil Harris, would quiz him about the great centers of NBA history, particularly Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

“In his eyes, these three guys were gods of the game,” O’Neal said in Springfield, Mass., on Friday.

Now, O’Neal can consider himself their peer, as he joined them and others as members of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

“I know that Wilt and my father are in heaven, smiling down upon us,” O’Neal said. “And if I know my father, he’s up there arguing with Wilt Chamberlain right now, trying to convince that his son is the most dominant big man to ever play the game.”

The Newark, N.J., native spent the best years of his 19-year career with the Lakers, helping lead them to three straight titles from 2000-02.

Before that, he spent his first four seasons in Orlando, from 1992-1996, where he quickly began dominating the league, earning an All-Star nod each year while making his mark off the court with projects like his rap album, “Shaq Diesel,” and film, “Kazaam,” in which he played a genie that lived in a boombox.

“After Orlando, I ended up in L.A.,” O’Neal said. “‘Kazaam 2’ was not yet in production, but what was in production was the beginning of a new Laker dynasty. The first few years were not easy, filled with trials and tribulations.

“But (then-General Manager) Jerry West and the Buss Family (in) their objective of rebuilding a dynasty knew exactly what to do: bring in the ‘Zen Master’: Phil Jackson.”

During his eight seasons in Los Angeles, O’Neal was named to seven All-Star teams (one year the game wasn’t held) and took home three NBA Finals MVP trophies as well as the 2000 regular-season MVP award.

The 7-foot-1, 325-pound giant led the league in scoring with 29.7 points per game in that 2000 campaign, while also pacing the NBA in field goal percentage six times.

During his induction speech, O’Neal — who has the second-most blocks (1,278) and second-highest scoring average (27.0) in franchise history — thanked many from his time in Los Angeles, including Robert Horry, Brian Shaw, Rick Fox, Horace Grant, Tyronn Lue, Devean George, Gary Vitti, Mike Penberthy, Del Harris, Jeanie Buss and Kobe Bryant.

Regarding the last of that group, O’Neal made light of his relationship with Bryant, as the pair powered the Lakers’ three-peat but were later entrenched in a highly-publicized feud with one another.

“(Bryant is) a guy that would push me and help me win three titles in a row,” O’Neal said. “He also helped me get pushed off the team and traded to Miami.”

O’Neal later won his fourth title with the Heat in 2006 before playing brief stints with Phoenix, Cleveland and Boston.

He is currently seventh on the NBA’s all-time scoring list (28,596), and also ranks 14th in rebounds (13,099), eighth in blocks (2,732) and fourth in field goal percentage (58.2).

Even such gaudy numbers speak only partially to how dominant O’Neal was, which was further attested to by a fellow member of the 2016 Hall of Fame class — former rival Yao Ming.

“A great athlete not only has great teammates, but also great opponents,” Yao said in his induction speech. “A great opponent pushed me (and) pushed us forward — great opponents like Shaquille O’Neal. Every game we played reminded me of the old saying that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

In addition to Shaq and Yao, the class also featured Zelmo Beaty, Darrell Garretson, Tom Izzy, John McLendon, Cumberland Posey, Jerry Reinsdorf, Sheryl Swoopes and another former adversary: Allen Iverson.

“I can’t leave without bringing up Shaq,” Iverson said in his speech. “I love him so much as a person. Obviously the most dominant big man we’ve ever seen, ever.”

O’Neal was accompanied on stage by Alonzo Mourning, Isiah Thomas, Julius Irving and one of the members of his father’s list: Russell.

Toward the end of his speech and with Russell by his side, O’Neal paid one more tribute to the man who taught him the game.

“When a father is quizzing his son on the great big men of the game,” O’Neal said. “hopefully Shaquille O’Neal’s name will be in the answer.”

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Shaq Inducted Into Basketball Hall of Fame

Between the parades through Downtown Los Angeles, the three Finals MVP trophies and the booming question of “Can youuuu dig it?!” to thousands of celebrating Lakers fans, it’s possible to forget the turbulent times that Shaquille O’Neal and the purple and gold faced during their three-peat era.

But for Brian Shaw — the former backup guard and current Associate Coach of the Lakers — the rougher patches revealed why those teams were so successful.

These instances include a regular season tilt against San Antonio, when Devean George made a costly end-of-game mistake that caused O’Neal to angrily confront the young small forward in the locker room after.

But Shaw wasn’t afraid to stand up to one of the most bruising players in league history.

“(O’Neal) was guarding Malik Rose in that game,” Shaw said. “And I said, ‘Devean is a young player. What are you getting on his case for? Because he made one mistake? Malik Rose had like 10 offensive rebounds, so maybe if you used some of that energy that you’re using on Devean to box out Malik Rose, maybe we would have won the game because of that.’”

From there, the 7-foot-1, 325-pound O’Neal let go of George and “charged” at Shaw.

“We got into what wasn’t much of a wrestling match,” Shaw said, laughing. “He twisted me up kind of like a pretzel.”

At 6-foot-6 and 190 pounds, Shaw might have been little more than a stick figure to O’Neal, but that didn’t stop him from speaking his mind and physically challenging him several times.

A self-described “no man,” Shaw served as an antidote for one of the world’s most popular figures, who found himself often surrounded by “yes men” who never uttered a negative word to him.

For that, O’Neal and Shaw’s relationship was all the stronger. After a few days of stewing over the George incident, O’Neal accepted fault and apologized to Shaw, whom he later named the teammate that he respected most in his career, which will be celebrated on Friday when he is inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

It makes sense considering that Shaw is one of O’Neal’s oldest teammates, as the “Shaw-Shaq Redemption” first hooked up in Orlando from 1994-96.

Shaw said that the connection was there from the very first day, as one only needed to make eye contact to know what the other was planning to do.

They later played together on the Lakers from 1999-2003, and Shaw — who shot 29.6 percent from 3-point range prior to L.A. and 32.6 percent after — claims that spike is a direct result from not wanting to fail the Big Fella.

“Obviously you have to double-team and triple-team him, so I think he helped me become a better shooter, especially later in my career,” Shaw said. “A lot of the time my man was going down to double him, so I didn’t want to let him down.”

Shaw considers himself a “student of the game,” and marvels at the effects that O’Neal had on the league, saying he “got a lot of big men jobs,” because teams would have to stack their rosters with centers in order to have enough to use their fouls and energy to guard the behemoth.

Shaw puts his old teammate up there with the likes of George Mikan, Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and other great bigs throughout history, claiming that he would rein supreme in any era of hoops — including this one.

“I think that he’s arguably the most dominant player ever when you put together his size and his ability and what he was able to do,” Shaw said. “The game now is a perimeter game. … If he was playing in today’s game, the Golden State Warriors and teams like that that get away with playing small ball, they wouldn’t be able to do that if there were any Shaqs out there.

“There were teams that were trying to do that back then — Sacramento, Phoenix — those teams always got 58-60 wins, they ran up and down, they shot a lot of 3’s, but we had the one thing that nobody else had.”

And that was a man who left the NBA with 15 All-Star selections, four championships, the 2000 MVP award and the seventh-most points of all-time.

But for all of his success between the buzzers, Shaw remembers O’Neal most for the “big kid” that he was outside of them.

“(He showed) his philanthropy off the court and that you can still do your job and follow your loves and passions in the things that he did off the court,” Shaw said. “He got criticized, scrutinized for rapping and acting and doing all that, but he was a kid — those are things that he always wanted to do, so he went after them.”

According to Shaw — who had been doing television work with O’Neal for TNT and NBA TV prior to joining Luke Walton’s coaching staff — the Big Aristotle is just as generous with his time, money and humor as ever.

He certainly was back in 2000, when he signed a contract extension with the Lakers and decided to thank the people around him in a shiny way, buying a Rolex watch for every player, coach and member of the training staff.

“He was like, ‘I can’t do what I do unless you guys give me the ball and take care of me and do all of those things,’” Shaw said.

And with that enormous talent for giving, O’Neal even accidentally showed up his teammates sometimes.

Shaw jokes that his children were “ruined” by the birthday parties that O’Neal threw for his own kids. Shaq’s best Gatsby impression featured the likes of Build-A-Bear, In-N-Out and Dippin’ Dots, which he would pay to come to his gigantic house just for the party.

“All the kids who came would leave with a bag of stuff like it was their birthday,” Shaw laughed. “My kids were looking at me (on their birthdays) like, ‘This is it?’ after they had been to one of his parties.”

Indeed, the Diesel set a high standard both on and off the floor.

As the centers that attempted to follow in the soon-to-be Hall of Famer’s wake can attest to: It isn’t easy filling those size-22 sneakers.

Shaq HOF

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