Steve Nash sued his own Suns teammate, Shaquille O’Neal, for stealing his idea for a TV show that he wanted to headline.
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If there were two superstars you wouldn’t expect to have somewhat of a beef with one another, it would be 7’0 Shaquille O’Neal and Canandian native, Steve Nash. Over the years however, the two have shared quite a bit of history with one another. The most popular would be controversial 2005 NBA regular season MVP race.
The 2004-05 season saw both Nash and Shaq in different jerseys, with both of them outperforming what their expectations were going into that season. Throughout that year, the narrative was that ‘The Big Aristotle’ was more of less the runaway MVP. However, as the Suns had their offense transformed by the floppy-haired PG, media members began to wonder, ‘Why not Nash for MVP?’
A hypothetical soon transformed into a certainty and this aligned itself perfectly with Shaquille O’Neal suffering injuries. Nash ended up winning the 2005 and the ‘06 MVP, leading Shaq go on about how he deserved the 2005 one at the minimum for the past 16 years.
Of course, we aren’t talking about this MVP race as we’re going to delve deeper into an incident that took place when the two were teammates.
Also read: Shaquille O’Neal spent north of $20 million just to become Tiger Woods’ next door neighbor
Shaquille O’Neal got sued by Steve Nash.
After bringing a championship to the Miami Heat in 2006, Shaquille O’Neal was traded away at the age of 35 to the Phoenix Suns 20 months later. Steve Nash and Shaq were finally teammates but this wasn’t all too great for the former as he claims to have had one of his ideas stolen from him by the 4x champ.
According to the Arizona Republic, Nash had told his newest teammate about an idea he had for a show where he would go up against world-class athletes in their own sport. Fast-forward to 2009 and Shaq made this show into a reality in a series called ‘Vs’ where he did exactly what Nash said he wanted to do.
The 2x MVP brought on the services of entertainment lawyer, Bob Loblaw, and this led to Nash being credited as an executive producer on the show. He would also be compensated for his involvement in the inception of this idea.
Funnily enough, another man by the name of Todd Gallagher sued Shaq for the same as he claimed the idea was identical to a premise he presented in his book, ‘Andy Roddick beat me with a frying pan’. Gallagher would receive $500,000 in a settlement.
