Berger: Worth the risk for Cavs
Shaquille O'Neal and LeBron James? Really? This is the antidote to the Orlando Magic?
Truth is, I don't know what it is. It seems like a mega-weird response by the Cavaliers to what remains of the dose of title interruptus they just caught, a late-arriving response to the league that had granted Cleveland a hall pass to a championship.
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| LeBron and Shaq on the same bench doesn't automatically mean the Cavaliers will capture an NBA championship. (Getty Images) |
• Cavaliers add Shaq to LeBron's court
Now maybe we're being too hard on O'Neal, who was a legitimate contributor on what was otherwise a disappointing Phoenix team. Or maybe the whiff of the Cavs trying to answer Kobe Bryant with his bete noire seems so desperately derivative. It's just so marketing department-meets-turn back the clock.
The only thing, really, that makes sense here is the fact that the Cavs didn't give up any of their useful players to get O'Neal, thereby making the only really hard part for coach Mike Brown being the best way to fit him into James' team.
And that itself seems too enormous a task, for Brown, his boss Danny Ferry or anyone else.
O'Neal's best days are long behind him, of course, and there's no shame in that. His legacy is already secure. But re-inflating him as the missing piece on a team that everyone thought whose time had already come?
There are, of course, ways to make any peg fit any hole. There will be basketball experts who can explain this as a brilliant act of tactical theatre, as well as chronic nostalgics who want to see O'Neal as he was in Orlando -- all-seeing, all-joking, all-powerful Shaq-Fu.
And maybe they're right. Nobody can be genuinely sure that this isn't actually mad genius, that O'Neal still has game to offer on a team that is already set in cement. One hesitates to pronounce it the act of self-aggrandizing lunacy it seems on the surface to be.
But genius is not the way to bet. There are too many rough examples of this sort of thing not working at all, in all sports. Sometimes it's chemistry, sometimes it's talent gone gray, sometimes it's one grasp too many.
And sometimes it's just too weird a thing on its face, an idea that delivers so many glancing blows without ever actually hitting the desired target.
That's how O'Neal to the Cav feels, particularly when you realize that this deal only succeeds if Cleveland wins the NBA championship. Nothing else will do, nothing else will satisfy.
That turns weird into weird for all the money in your pocket, and suddenly weird doesn't seem quite so appealing. Maybe Shaq to Denver would play, or Shaq to Atlanta, or Shaq to Dallas. Maybe because those teams are in more desperate straits, a reach like O'Neal would seem more justified.
But now we've arrived at the real point, which is that this trade just makes your eyeballs throb because it is supposed to do so much in such a short space of time. It is supposed to remake the Cavaliers without turning them on their heads. It is supposed to overthrow the Lakers and break Kobe's happy vibe. It is supposed to establish Cleveland as the true center of the basketball universe.
And Shaq is 37 years old.
But let's try to find the happy place for this trade, and what we find is this: It's a nice example of the What The Hell school of thinking -- "Let's do something that doesn't hurt what we have and might actually work if everything goes perfectly."
If that's a good enough reason for you, then it's a nice deal -- having your cake and eating it at the same time. You'll get attention, you'll become your own take.
But if you're results-oriented, if you believe in the percentages, you're probably not so keen on it. It looks to you like an attention-grabber that won't translate in any other language. Including the language of basketball.
