This has been the off-season of online NBA beefs. A couple weeks ago it was two franchises fighting via emojis. This week it’s Shaquille O’Neal and Scottie Pippen squabbling on a public forum over whose franchise is better. It’s the equivalent of a school-kid cafeteria argument over whose dad would win in a fight. And though it got many people talking and gawking online, both of these big-time NBA talents came out of it looking small.
Shaq picked the fight with Pippen, posting a photo pitting the five greatest Lakers of all time (the only level of modesty he showed in the whole back and forth was putting Kareem Abdul-Jabbar at centre and himself at power forward) against the five greatest Bulls of all time, and adding a caption: “We would beat em by fifty.”
In the back-and-forth that followed, Pippen used a predictable “We won six, you won three” argument and took shots at Shaq’s free-throw shooting—a better retort would have been “we won 72 games”—and O’Neal rebutted with insults along the lines of “I was Batman, you were Robin.”
Conspicuously absent from the online banter were Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan. When the DeAndre Jordan emoji battle was at its height Kobe tweeted out five championship-trophy emojis and then the Jordan brand Twitter account shut down the conversation by sending out a goat emoji reminding everyone, of course, that he’s the “greatest of all time”), but neither has gotten involved here.
Regardless, it’s a great barbershop debate that both fan bases and local radio stations can eat up during the dog days of summer. What I’m curious about, though, is what this says about both O’Neal and Pippen. Why did Shaq feel the need to use the hashtag “#youwereok” in reference to Pippen? Why did Pippen have to take shots at Shaq’s difficulties from the charity stripe? Why do they feel the need to brush each other aside to claim their proverbial spot on the basketball Walk of Fame?
What it comes down to for me is a definite ring of insecurity in the jabs. While Pippen’s a Hall of Famer who gets respect amongst everyone in the game he’s not in an active Instagram beef with, it naturally must bother him that he’s always referred to as Jordan’s sidekick—his name is always second on the marquee. Being the “Pippen to someone’s Jordan” is a descriptor used in other walks of life for being a good No. 2.
Shaq, meanwhile, won without Kobe, but he was the one the Lakers sent out of Hollywood. I wonder if he daydreams about how many more rings he’d have if he was the big brother Kobe was looking for and not the bully on the block. Or if he’d opted to use his off-seasons to rehab hard after injury, rather than focusing on his rapping and acting careers, and saying things like “I got injured on company time, I’ll rehab on company time.”
In the end, Shaq was right—the all-time Lakers would beat the all-time Bulls. By my count the Lake Show boasts nearly 50 percent of the best 15 players ever. That means their bench would include a couple of legends. No one player—not even the GOAT in his prime—could overcome the depth of talent the Lakers boast.
O’Neal also probably won the verbal joust as trash talking and social media are two things he specializes in. Yet although the rubbernecking aspect of it was fun to consume it ultimately exposed more about the frail psyches of two of the greats than it did about how great they were.