Shaquille O'Neal used to deflate balls before games so he could palm it "a la Michael Jordan"
Shaquille O'Neal vs. San Antonio Spurs
© RVR Photos-USA TODAY Sports
You'd think that being 7-1, 325 lbs was enough. But not for Shaquille O'Neal.
The freight train that he was, Diesel still looked for other ways to gain a competitive advantage over his peers. It turns out deflating balls before games was his go-to.
"I'd have a needle"
According to ESPN's Baxter Holmes, O'Neal admitted he would walk up to the ball rack before the tip-off, "let a little bit of air out, squeeze it," and get it to his liking.
"Sometimes, in the games during all my championship runs, if a ball was too hard, I let air out," Shaq said. "I’d have a needle. A friend of mine would have a needle and I would get the game ball. … I needed that extra grip, but I wasn’t doing that for cheating purposes. I just needed the extra grip for my hands so I could palm it, a la Michael Jordan, the way he used to palm it."
Shaq's hand size is estimated to be 10.25 inches in length and 12 inches wide -- for comparison's sake, Giannis' hand measurements are 9.85/12 inches. Still, Shaq felt like he needed to go out of his way to make sure that palming the ball is never an issue.
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Some would say what he did should be considered cheating; the Hall of Famer himself would disagree.
"Because, first of all, I'm not aware of any letter of the law that says, you can't let air out of the ball," O'Neal said. "I'm not aware of that. Second of all, it's all about my [comfort level]. A lot of times, if the balls have too much air in them, they're too bouncy. I didn't want them to be bouncy. I needed that grip."
Shaq isn't the only one to do it
This is far from a common NBA practice, but O'Neal isn't the first one to do it.
In a story published in 1986, Phil Jackson told the Chicago Tribune that the championship Knicks of the 70s were doing the same thing, deflating the balls to a minimum to slow the game down.
“We were a short team with our big guys like Willis , our center, only about 6-8 and Jerry Lucas also 6-8, DeBusschere, 6-6. So what we had to rely on was boxing out and hoping the rebound didn’t go long. To help ensure that, we’d try to take some air out of the ball. You see, on the ball it says something like ‘inflate to 7 to 9 pounds.’ We’d all carry pins and take the air out to deaden the ball," Jackson said.
To say deflated balls were a decisive factor in both teams' championship runs would be a reach -- especially in Shaq's case who, alongside Kobe Bryant, orchestrated one of the most dominant stretches of basketball we've ever seen. But the correlation is there.
Two guys admitted to tampering with the air pressure in basketballs. Both of them have NBA rings to show for it.
Oh, and btw, Tom Brady was doing the same thing. It's safe to say it worked for him.
