To win an Oscar, Shaq needs supporting cas

Sunday, August 11, 1996

Making cap room for O’Neal has cost Lakers much depth

If a Shaq lands in L.A. and there isn’t a team ready to help
him, does he win a championship?

It’s been almost a month now since Shaquille O’Neal switched
coasts and Disney theme parks ­ more than enough time for the
euphoria to subside and the unfortunate truth to shine through: the
Lakers still aren’t championship contenders.

Yes, you read me correctly. $120 million later and they’re still
not ready to challenge for a title.

Now before you jump to any rash conclusions regarding my sanity
or my Communist Party affiliation, let me quickly reaffirm the
obvious: the Lakers are a better team with Shaq than without him.
The problem is, quite simply, that they’re still not good
enough.

O’Neal couldn’t win a title in Orlando despite playing for three
seasons alongside fellow superstar Anfernee Hardaway. "So what?"
you say. "What does that have to do with our championship Laker
team?" To put it bluntly, there are no Penny-quality players on
this team. There aren’t even any Horace Grants. Cedric Ceballos is
the only member of the squad to have made the All-Star team, and
even he has done so only once.

What’s more, it’s not as if the Lakers simply added Shaq to last
year’s squad. The cost of obtaining the big guy, and I don’t mean
his $120 million price tag, has seriously changed the makeup of
this team. In order to free up room under the cap for his
monumental contract, the Lakers traded or renounced seven players
(eight if you count the "retired" Magic Johnson), leaving only one
member of last year’s bench on the team.

The cap purge had a promising, albeit risky, start with the
Vlade Divac-Kobe Bryant trade. Any number of teams were interested
in the promising high schooler, but either lacked the balls (yes,
New Jersey, this means you) or the trade bait to land him. The
consensus is that this kid (isn’t it great that there are actually
pro athletes young enough for me to call "kid") is destined for
stardom in the not-so-distant future. However, exactly where and
when is not so certain.

This season, and perhaps for the next few seasons, the best case
scenario is for Bryant to contribute as the sixth man, playing
major minutes as a backup guard and small forward. A more likely
outcome is that he’ll spend at least the first half of the season
à la Kevin Garnett, scrounging for minutes as he adjusts to
the lifestyle and develops a pro game on the fly.

The Laker’s long-term hope has to be for Bryant to continue
growing over the next few seasons, eventually becoming big enough
to take over permanently at small forward after they rid themselves
of the cancer that is Cedric Ceballos. Bryant’s current
6-foot-5-inch, 200-pound frame would be fine against guards and
smaller forwards, but a big three like Seattle’s Detlef Schrempf or
Washington’s Juwan Howard would eat him for lunch.

And make no mistake: Ceballos’ spot is the place for Bryant to
break into the starting lineup. Jerry West was so incensed after
Ceballos’ and Nick Van Exel’s respective brain farts late last
season (don’t tell me you’ve forgotten about the water-skiing trip
and the ref shoving so soon!) that he vowed to get rid of both of
them.

While Van Exel’s subsequent apologies to the team, not to
mention the serious lack of quality point guards in the league,
will almost certainly keep him around. Ceballos’ days are numbered.
If his immature actions hadn’t dropped his trade value to about the
level of a Whopper and small order of fries, he would be gone
already.

As it is, it will be a major surprise if he’s still around after
the mid-season trading deadline. The only danger in waiting at all
is that he might do something else before they can get rid of him,
dropping his value even further. If, as everyone assumes, last
season’s vacation was a result of Ceballos’ jealousy over minutes
and points he was losing to Magic, just imagine how he’ll react to
Shaq.

Unfortunately, the non-Kobe related moves did not bring about
such a windfall. Needing more cap room, the Lakers next move was to
give up valuable sixth-man Anthony Peeler and frequently used
reserve George Lynch for the right to swap two second round draft
choices with Vancouver, the NBA’s equivalent of a handful of magic
beans. Peeler had been the starter at shooting guard before the
Lakers drafted Eddie Jones two years ago and still managed 10.3
points per game in 1994-95 as a reserve.

While his numbers slipped somewhat last year as he lost playing
time to Magic, he still provided a valuable offensive spark off of
the bench and almost single-handedly won several games during the
last few weeks of the season.

Peeler will in all likelihood start for Vancouver, and the
increased minutes could easily translate into 15-20 points per
game. In the 24 games he started during the 1994-95 season when
Jones went out with a shoulder injury, Peeler averaged 17.3 points.
Call me crazy, but a starter should be worth at least those picks
outright. Throwing in Lynch just escalates it to highway robbery. I
know they needed the cap room taken up by these guys’ salaries to
bring in Shaq, but there must have been better deals out there than
this.

Similarly chucked overboard was backup point guard Sedale
Threatt, a free agent whose rights the Lakers renounced early on in
the Shaq negotiations. In addition to providing a rare veteran
voice on what is now the youngest team in the league, Threatt also
provided descent three-point shooting, something the team sorely
needed more of even before his release.

The O’Neal and Campbell contracts further compound the problem
by greatly limiting the cap room available to re-stock that bench.
After signing veteran big man Sean Rooks, formerly of Atlanta, the
salary cap has limited the team to filling the remaining roster
spots with players willing to accept the league minimum of
$247,500.

This has resulted in a reserve corps which, other than Bryant
and Rooks, has more questions than answers. As of now, the bench
consists of an unknown rookie point guard from a tiny Southern
college, a rookie project who has already been released by one NBA
team, an NBA journeyman and former CBAer, and the utterly
forgettable Corie Blount, last season’s sole holdover.

What’s more, while the Lakers may have made some gains, the
competition doesn’t appear to have slipped at all. San Antonio and
Utah will field the same teams that gave the Lakers fits last
season. Even worse, the Sonics, who made it to the finals last
year, actually improved over the summer, finally acquiring a
legitimate starting center in Jim McIlvaine and some offensive
spark off the bench in Craig Ehlo. And should the Rockets still
manage to trade for Barkley …

With this kind of competition, even making the finals is
anything but a forgone conclusion, Shaq or no Shaq. Winning them
(i.e., beating the Bulls) is another story entirely.

More realistic is to view the acquisition of Shaq as simply one
step, albeit a big one, toward a championship. He is not the last
piece in the Laker’s championship puzzle, but neither is he the
first; the players still around from last year have already laid a
solid foundation in winning. Shaq simply adds to that.

And if it takes a few years, don’t sweat it. Remember, despite
the fact that it seems like we’ve been seeing him hawk shoes and
soda forever, he’s just 24 and has only been in the league for four
years. It took that Jordan guy seven years to win his first title,
and even Kareem took five seasons to bring a championship to
L.A.

Rob Kariakin is a basketball fanatic who sits for hours on end
mesmerized by the ESPN sports ticker. He works hard at debunking
the myth that white boys have no hops but can stick the jumper, and
wants it known that he can neither dunk nor shoot.