Locker room and player meetings are sacred to all athletes. There’s an unwritten rule that states anything that happens in a locker room or a player meeting should stay there. However, with the steady increase in media power over the years, the content of these meetings often gets leaked to publications, causing players a lot of grief. It happened to Joel Embiid most recently, and Shaquille O’Neal recalled his reaction when player meeting contents were leaked to the media during his playing days.
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During an episode of ‘The Big Podcast‘, Shaq brought up the topic of leaks after talking about the 76ers’ recent situation. He spoke about how he didn’t like how the Lakers’ players-only meeting would inevitably leak information, and he remembered how it would always be Jim Gray who reported the information to the public.
He revealed that he did eventually find out who would leak information, but he had to threaten his teammates with violence in order to do so. However, he didn’t inform the listeners who the leak was.
“All the beefs that we had, people would just find out. especially like when I would call the meeting, lot of times, Jim Gray was the guy that always got the information. And I know who he got the information from, but I won’t say. Cos I was going to put my hands on some people, and when you get aggressive, information flows.”
Jim Gray is an Emmy award-winning sportscaster and has worked on several events like the NBA Finals, the All-Star Game, and the Olympics among others. Gray was also close to many athletes including Kobe Bryant. When Bryant called Shaq out in 2003, he went to Gray for an interview, and it was a scathing indictment of his HOF teammate. Shaq and Kobe’s relationship rapidly deteriorated after that, which just further deepened Shaq’s dislike for Gray.
Shaq’s reaction to the leaks is pretty similar to what Joel Embiid said about the 76ers’ locker room snitch too. When Emniid spoke to the media in the aftermath of the leak, he was visibly furious, and called the person “a real piece of sh*t.”
However, according to a report that Jake Fisher released a week back, Embiid was still adamant on finding the leak. With the 76ers at 3-14 right now, and Embiid still out with an injury, he probably wants to ensure that any further team meetings don’t get leaked.
