Shaquille O’Neal retired yesterday and that single tweet has created a lot of articles, comments, tweets and posts about his legacy, greatness, championships, all-stars games, charisma and other predictable stuff.
To balance that ocean of praise here’s a look at weak side of Shaquille O’Neal’s Career:
(Please don’t get me wrong, I think Shaq was one of the all-time greats, but he won massive reward at genetic lottery and probably could have been mythical GOAT… and kind of settled for way less than that.
So at least IMHO he left a taste of opportunity lost)
1) He had problems with his weight for at least half of his career.
Many of his stats [Minutes, TRB%, STL%, BLK%, TOV%, USG%] negatively correlated with his official weight.
And I won’t even mention and include those unofficial ones. To be fair, he was also getting older during that time but I’m pretty sure those 20 or 40 extra pounds have only accelerated that process.
2) His defense… had a bad reputation.
“Was it justified?” is probably a different topic but in retrospect it’s shocking that with his combination of rebounding, blocking, speed, size and agility he was never nominated to the first NBA All-Defensive Team!
And he was nominated to second NBA All-Defensive Team only 3 times!
3) He played less than 80% of possible games in regular season.
That’s one of the worst rates among players who played more than 1000 games.
For example, Antonio McDyess played more… and he had a career-threatening knee problems.
On the other hand Shaq’s injury history is all over the map and probably too long.
How many of those 45 entries could have been avoided with a better diet and/or preparation habits? Read the rest of this entry »
Weak Side Awareness 