Professional track and field sprinter Noah Lyles has triggered a storm in the NBA community after he questioned the validity of the “World Champion” title commonly attributed to the NBA Champion team. His comments have created a brouhaha on social media, with many NBA superstars responding to the contentious argument. Meanwhile, Shaquille O’Neal, who won four NBA titles in his career, expressed his opinion on Lyles’ comments by sharing a 13-year-old speech from San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich.
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Several NBA players took to X and reacted to the comments made by the 20-year-old athlete. Phoenix Suns stars Devin Booker and Kevin Durant expressed their disappointment with the young star’s comments. Durant wrote, “Somebody help this brother”, before D-Book chimed in with a facepalm emoji. While the Miami Heat star Bam Adebayo wrote, “Lol is somebody going to tell him??”, Draymond Green commented, “When being smart goes wrong.” Quite understandably, NBA stars were not happy with Lyles’ remarks.
Shaquille O’Neal shares Gregg Popovich’s World Champion comment from 2010
Shaq has won four NBA championships, one with the Miami Heat and three with the Los Angeles Lakers. The Big Aristotle has three ‘World Championship’ banners hanging from the rafters of the Crypto.com Arena in LA from the Lakers’ three-peat in the early 2000s. However, Shaq seemed to resonate with the comments made by Spurs coach Pop over a decade ago. In 2010, Gregg Popovich had said that the NBA Championship doesn’t not qualify a team or a player for the World Champion title and it was flat-out wrong to do so. Pop had said,
“It doesn’t make sense for an NBA team to call themselves world champions. I don’t remember anybody playing anybody outside our borders to get that tag.”
The Spurs coach differentiated between different Championship titles and said that the Spanish team were the World Champion (Spain had won the 2006 FIBA World Cup), the USA were the Olympic Champions and the Lakers were the NBA champions. Pop’s thinking surprisingly echoes Lyles’ comments and Shaq seems to resonate with the argument.
Shaq and Pop share a relationship beyond the basketball court
Shaq and Popovich met in the postseason a few times and also in the regular season. While the Big Diesel was in the prime of his career with the Los Angeles Lakers, coach Pop had to face the brunt of his greatness. However, their respect for each other’s craft only brought them closer to each other.
Shaq recently opened up that even before he was drafted into the league, Pop was one of those people who helped him. The elite coach sent O’Neal a few pairs of shoes through his father when the 4 x NBA champion was unable to afford them. Pop was also perhaps the last coach to use Hack-a-Shaq on O’Neal while he was at the twilight of his legendary NBA career. The game plan against the Big Aristotle wasn’t anything else but an ode to the royal career that he has had over the years in the league.
