Please don’t twist my words , I never said he could of done as good as them.
I’m saying shaq could of at least gain 20% more efficiency in FT to reach the nba average while other like him at 7 foot tall , durant and dirk for example, had like around 10-15% above the nba average .
That is a 30% differential minimum, in a pretty basic basketball skill.
There was simply no excuses.

He could of done sooooo much more.
Shaq was so smooth early days :

https://youtu.be/1NwgNLW9ASQ

Hence imo, focusing on achievements is the way to go for goat status .
With “if’s” , like statistical numbers , you can almost deduct anything from those since it depends a lot of the context you use.

What is probably more interesting is examining why it is such a polarizing issue.

No other sport really has an issue of who is the GOAT is that gets people this fired up and ultimately it is pretty meaningless since they can never play and no one is going to make any money betting on who is better barring time travel being invented.

I watched 10 mins of the doc, found it boring. Not because the content wasn't good but this story has already been told ad nauseam. Same for the Celtics/Lakers one, just beaten into the ground.

The 30 for 30 on the Magic was good because it actually had a story to tell that had not yet been told.

Go see tennis thread.
Lot polarization there as well.

Also Mr Roth loves sounding pretentious without actually saying anything

Did he marry a thesaurus?

Messi, Ronaldo, Maradona, or Ronaldo Nazario?

Funny seeing Mike cry when Scottie was out and the bulls couldn't win on the road.

Meanwhile Bron took Mo Williams to the finals, won a ship with Kyrie as his robin and Ty Lue as coach. He then took Kevin freaking Love to the finals again when Kyrie left.

Lebron with Pippen, Rodman, Kukoc, Kerr and Phil Jackson never wins by less than 20.

Right, one could argue LeBron is GOAT if you take an 11 game sample size in 1997 when Pippen was injured and Jordan @ 34 years old was frustrated they had lost a few games.

Nevermind that they ended up going 24-11 by the time Pippen returned and 62-20 by end of the year and won their 6th title in 8 years (3 more than LeBron in his entire career; 2 with a handpicked superteam; 1 against a team with a hobbled/injured MVP in the finals). Yeah let's cherry pick those 12 games over a 15 year career.

See SABR42, this is what I'm talking about. Yeah we may have twog on the MJ side but you guys have like at least 10 twogs on the LeBron side. Banding together in LeBron's honor doesn't make the arguments and comments any less stupid.

not really. and not in this case.

I mean, Lebron is not really known for being a great evaluator of talent. He is however, known for being pretty great at handling the media.

Jordan is a POS crybaby -EV gambling womanizer.

LeBron is the 2nd coming of Basketball Jesus.

/thread

shaq was beyond lazy
shaq admits he was lazy
his free throw shooting was an absolute disgrace and he didn't care
"so what"? right because actually giving a **** and shooting 70 percent wouldn't have made him a better player

you can't assume he doesn't care just because he said he doesn't care, he's talking to the media. Plenty of players simply don't shoot better than .600, they're not all lazy

Shaq is like ronaldo nazario. More talent than anyone. Very fat now.

labron wears 23 as a total coincidence and not because hes a beta *****

Shaq was never going to be better than a 60% free throw shooter.

Yes, we know how much LeBron loves playing with PF that can't pass or shoot, and consistently clog up the paint.

Also, LeBron has Phil fired halfway through season 1 for saying something about his "posse", then trying to run his silly triangle offense.

I agree, Thomas was great.
I’d flip Kidd and Nash but I just never loved Kidd so there’s some bias.

I was never a fan of Pippen and thought he was overrated. I came to the conclusion I must be way off after he was selected to the Top 50 of all time.

Mo Will being better than Pippen should shutdown this thread, but also it could just lead to it adding 1500 pages by the time the COVID vaccine hits.

What if it never hits? Maybe the thread morphs into who was better Mo Williams or Isiah Thomas? Something to think about.

Yeah, you wonder how he even became an all star with all the baggage he had

truly amazing

part of you must wish they could just invent time travel and settle this, save you a ton of time

Anyone who has Bron over MJ after only 2 episodes needs serious counseling

I mean it's a wrap "King" stans. It's always been a wrap but now we tripled bagged that *****. Take the L!

The Jordan side has been reduced to arguing mo Williams was better than pippen so you may wanna hold up on that

The only contribution to the thread I have is Stockton was a little overrated. Nice guy, class act, 1 team his whole career, amazing longevity and durability. Also, the sport was at its commercial peak for that era when the Jazz played the Bulls in the finals b2b years.

(I think Malone is the most overrated of the elite players as well for somewhat similar reasons)

But I put most of the other elite point guards over him. If you have 2 of the 20-25 best players of all time you don't lose to teams like the KJ Suns, run TMC, the Sonics, the Blazers. And if you look at all of these years, Stockton was either played even or outplayed by his PG counterpart. GP/Porter/KJ/Hardaway.

All time steals leader so it is assumed he was elite on D but look at the box scores/stats from those series, basically everyone good was hitting him up with ease.

And his #'s were padded by Sloan's system, Deron Williams also produced excellent numbers in that system.

You don't have two guys ranked as high as they are on OAT lists and not sniff the finals until they were well into their 30's.

Imagine if Dirk and CP3 played together for 13 years and couldn't make a finals until late into their careers? Yeah, probably not.

Serious inquiry here:

So why was Phil Jackson so adamant about having the Knicks run the Triangle why he was Team President when the roster didn't fit the Triangle AT ALL?

Was Phil just trolling Dolan and all of the fans while he cashed checks?

Further serious inquiry:

So doesn't just prove that Phil Jackson was a complete fraud who wouldn't be able to win unless he had the best players in the league?