The Lakers team from early 2000s has to be considered as one of the greatest that the NBA has ever seen, as they won 3 consecutive titles and had a near perfect record in the playoffs.
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Shaq takes a lot of pride in that Lakers team and feels that they would have beaten the Warriors team of today. He did admit that a lot of fans might feel differently, but ‘that’ Lakers team was one of the best in history.
“I think we’d easily win,” Shaq said as quoted by USA today.
“Other people might feel different, they (the Warriors) might feel different. But we had one of the best teams of all-time in 2001 when we went 15-1 in the playoffs. We would’ve gone 16-0 but A.I. (Hall of famer Allen Iverson) went off on us and stepped over (former Laker) Ty Lue.” he added.
The Warriors resurgence in the last 5 years or so has been impeccable to see. Steph and co. have revolutionised NBA, by brining the 3 pointer into play a lot and have largely swept through teams.
The Warriors have won 3 championships in the last 4 years and will be gunning for a 3rd consecutive one this year.
Curry obviously did not agree with Shaq’s comments, saying that he was ‘dead wrong’, as the Warriors had the ability to go up and down all day.
“Oh, he’s dead wrong,” Curry said as quoted by ESPN.
“Of course. We’d beat them. We can go back-and-forth all day.” he added.
Curry then was quick to point out that such comparisons are largely for entertainment purposes as you can’t really know what would have happened as time travel is not an option.
“For me, I think it’s a tough conversation because I’ve always found it hard to compare eras to each other. […] I saw Shaq today talked about his three-peat championship team would have destroyed us for whatever reason.” Curry said
“All those conversations are just entertaining because (1) who knows? (2) the game is so different.
“Teams that dominated their respective eras need to be left alone in terms of what that means. Hopefully that’s how they’ll approach us when they talk about us 20, 30 years from now looking back.” he added.
Warriors do have a good chance of matching the record that was set by the Lakers during the 2000-02 period. But as Curry said, you never really know what could have happened and the debate would go on and on.
Curry has been involved in two controversies in the past week, one of course being that Moon landing one and the other with Shaq, but he seems to have toned both of them down admirably.
