Since he signed his $1.3MM one-year contract with the Celtics, Shaq has once again become a topic of conversation for a team viewed as a potential championship contender.
This is all well and good. I enjoy the fact that Shaq is still in the NBA. Specifically, I enjoy the fact that he is still on a team that will warrant some publicity so that he can spit out fantastic sound bites. Say what you want about whether or not trading for him was the right move, but it’s pretty hard to deny that the man acted like a complete professional while with the Cavs last season. (Windhorst’s own words via his Twitter feed back on August 13th.)
For all those reasons, I wish Shaq well—especially since his potential success means, on some level, Miami’s failure.
That said, the opinions I’m hearing from pundits once again highlight how much their thinking is colored by a complete lack of logic.
Since the Cavs acquired Shaq last June, the overwhelming opinion was that he was too old, washed up, out of shape, and essentially a complete liability.
Since signing with Boston, though, all I hear about is what a valuable asset he is. How he’s exactly what the Celtics need to compete for a ring. How shrewd and wise a GM Danny Ainge is for making this kind of move.
Horse shit.
To take just one golden example, the great sage Bill Simmons spent the entire 2009-10 season making fat jokes about Shaq and talking about how he was just going to “clog the lane”—the chorus that became so viral among NBA analysts that it felt like someone had hired Karl Rove to concoct it.
Now? Simmons is already talking about how much sense this signing makes for his boys in green. He discussed it at length with Steve Kerr in his podcast a few weeks back, in fact.
To clarify, I’m not saying that there isn’t merit to Boston signing Shaq. What I’m saying is that it can’t be an awful move for the Cavs a year earlier and then a great move for the Celtics now.
For instance, Boston played faster than the Cavs last season, but almost insignificantly so. The Celtics averaged 93.6 possessions / game vs. 93.4 for Cleveland. So if his speed was a liability in one system, it should still be a liability in the other.
What about the clogging the lane myth? Is driving to the hoop unimportant in the Celtics’ offense?
Rajon Rondo averaged 5.4 shot attempts “at the rim” (i.e. layups) per game in 2009-10, plus another 1.7 attempts per game from within 10’ of the basket. LeBron averaged 6.8 attempts “at the rim” per game, along with another 1.3 attempts from within 10’. Add those two distance categories together, and there’s basically a 1 attempt per game difference between the paint activity of Boston’s main driver and Cleveland’s.
How about money? Yes, Shaq’s much more affordable to Boston since he’s on a veteran minimum contract. But had he not worked out for the Cavs, Shaq was a massive expiring contract that could’ve been a valuable trade chip had things not seemed to be working. As it stood, the Cavs held onto him and cleared $21MM in cap space in the process. So the financial argument doesn’t really hold up either.
Minutes? Shaq averaged 23.4 per game for the Cavs last season. With Kendrick Perkins out until at least December, Shaq likely projects as the starting Center and will probably play somewhere near that number. It may not last for the whole season, but it seems to me as though part of the reason they got him is to play big minutes during this opening stretch of the season. If he moves to the bench, though, Shaq will essentially replace Rasheed Wallace…who averaged 22.6 minutes per game for Boston.
What about age? Did Shaq age backwards in the past 365 days? Uh, no.
The final analysis here is simple: the Cavs and Celtics were more similar in their style of play than a lot of people chose to recognize. As a result, Shaq’s addition to the Celtics doesn’t realistically mean much different to what it meant for the Cavs. Instead, he stands as just another example of how different the same player can look to pundits when he’s standing by the Charles River rather than the Cuyahoga.
-T
