Shaquille O’Neal has never minced his words when it came to criticizing players of today’s NBA. The 4x NBA champion took up the job as an analyst with ‘Inside the NBA’ after retiring from the league in 2011 and has given his opinion on this generation’s hoopers quite fearlessly.
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The brutal honesty with which O’Neal criticizes players has both been lauded and frowned upon over the years. His takes on players such as Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert in the past year have been brought into question as well.
However, prior to Shaq finding faults in All-NBA caliber players, he had found himself a pretty easy target in the form of JaVale McGee. McGee was never a star player. He was a role-playing center who banged down low and tried to get stops to the best of his abilities. Unfortunately, he was prone to a litany of silly mistakes.
Shaquille O’Neal and JaVale McGee went at one another
Shaquille O’Neal has a segment on ‘Inside the NBA’ called ‘Shaqtin a Fool’ where he pokes fun at any and every player in the league who has a flub in a game. JaVale McGee was one such player who routinely seemed to have a game where he did one odd thing or the next.
He would appear on ‘Shaqtin a Fool’ quite often and had become more known as a player on the segment rather than an actual player in the NBA. His criticism of McGee got to a point where he took to Twitter to call out the Los Angeles Lakers legend, leading to quite the back and forth between the two.
The iconic ‘JaVale McGee’ call from Shaq would soon die out however as Shaq refused to talk about the Warriors center on his segment. It was reported by ‘The Big Aristotle’ himself that the team he was on had their executives call TNT to get him to stop poking fun at him.
Shaquille O’Neal went at another center recently
Shaquille O’Neal earned close to $300 million over the course of his 19-year career. Despite this, he fails to understand how someone like Rudy Gobert can get close to earning that much money with a single contract of his.
Gobert has been berated by Shaq quite often over the past year for his lackluster play on both the Utah Jazz and the Minnesota Timberwolves. He would however, use him as an example for up and coming players who could potentially snag a similar type of contract if they learn to play like him.
