NBACentel Strikes Again: No, Shaquille O’Neal Did Not FaceTime Angel Reese 17 Times in a Day

Shaquille O’Neal has been video-calling Chicago Sky Center Angel Reese 17 times a day. That’s the headline some online media sites have been running after an X post claiming the same went viral. Many fans believed these rumors unwittingly and started sharing the posts, which added to the confusion.

Meanwhile, many reports about Shaq being ‘creepy’ to Reese had flooded the Internet over the past week after the big man’s appearance on the WNBA star’s podcast. During the show, Shaq had made a few comments that had rubbed some people the wrong way and had even made Reese visibly uncomfortable.

Parody account NBACentel utilized this opportunity to publish some fake news about Shaq calling Reese repeatedly to gain some traction.

Claim:

The parody X account, NBACentel, posted an edited photo on their page with the caption, “Angel Reese shows all the missed calls she gets from Shaq.” The edited screengrab showed ‘BIG DIESEL’, which is one of Shaq’s most popular monikers, repeatedly featured in Reese’s call logs. The number of missed FaceTime video calls were 17 to be exact.

 

The post has garnered 15.8 million views at the time of writing, which has clearly triggered these rumors.

Reason: 

On Angel Reese’s podcast Unapologetically Angel last week, Shaq suggested some changes that might make the WNBA more popular. Initially, he prescribed that the league should lower the rim’s height to prompt more dunks in the games.

However, then he suggestively claimed that Reese dunking on the shortened rims with her “little a** shorts” would make the WNBA more appealing and bring in more eyeballs. Reese was visibly uncomfortable with the lewd suggestion and proceeded to cut off Shaq from his monologue as he was still going on.

NBACentel capitalized on these reports and posted the edited screenshot on X, so that people would be more inclined to believe his fake story. And it worked exactly like they had anticipated.

Verdict:

As detailed above, the story is entirely fabricated. NBACentel’s name and logo closely copies that of the reliable X media site, NBACentral. Therefore, a lot of people often tend to believe their satirical posts without close inspection.

After the post went viral, Reese clarified on X, “Don’t believe everything you see & read!”

However, there’s no denying that Shaq’s comments on Reese’s podcast created the foundation for this fake story. Most people knew Shaq as a kind of a father-figure to Angel since her LSU days. So the Lakers legend’s comments shocked many of them.

In another instance on the podcast, Shaq said that one of the reasons why he chose LSU over other colleges during his NCAA days was because the girls at the university back then looked like Angel. This also made the 22-year-old a little uncomfortable.

It will now be interesting to see how these controversies impact Shaq and Reese’s relationship with each other.