Shaquille O’Neal has fired back at comments Kobe Bryant made in an interview with Patrick Bet-David about O’Neal’s work ethic during their time with the Los Angels Lakers.
Bryant believes he would have 12 championship rings if Shaq would’ve worked harder. He also said O’Neal could’ve been the greatest player of all time if he spent more time in the gym.
“He’d be the greatest of all time. He’d be the first to tell you that,” Bryant said. “Me and Shaq sit down all the time and I say, ‘Dude if your lazy a– was in shape…”
When Shaq caught wind of Kobe’s latest criticism, he took to Instagram to say Bryant would have more championships if he “passed the ball more especially in the Finals against the Pistons.”
Peep Shaq’s response below/watch Kobe’s clip above.
On the topic of Bryant not passing, Raja Bell recently revealed on CBS Sports’ “Kanell and Bell” podcast that Shaq had a secret code with Lakers teammates to stop passing Bryant the ball.
Bell played with O’Neal on the Phoenix Suns, and he claims that Shaq once told him that the Lakers used a signal when they planned to stop passing to Bryant because he was shooting too much:
“Shaq told me a story. We had a kid named Gordon Giricek on our Suns team, he had gotten there, and Gordon would go in the game, and Gordon was about his buckets. So Gordon would get in, and no matter what we were doing, no matter what the flow or the chemistry was, Gordon would be just, you know, shooting the ball. Gordon was my guy, I played with him in Utah.
“But Shaq started saying ‘hey guys, this is the symbol’ (twitches thumbs downward) ‘when I give you this, Gordon doesn’t get the ball anymore.’ And I’m like ‘dude what is the background on that, where’d you come up with that?’ And he was like ‘when Kobe was young, he would be going in and just trying to get ’em, so the rest of us had a universal kind of code that if we looked at each other and went (gives signal) then that meant Kobe didn’t get the ball anymore.’”
