All-Time NBA great, legend, and former Miami Heat champion, Shaquille O’Neal, is better than Tim Duncan. Here’s why so, even if the numbers don’t look like it.
The Assessment
When you scrutinize the titles, the honors, and the numbers, they come out to be a wash, because in the grand scheme of things, they were that close. You do look at the All-Defensive team honors disparity, but even the best defenders are only worth about three overall points off the other team’s score, so Shaq’s four more points per game across his career accounts for that.
You also have to consider what your eyes tell you and if yours don’t say that Shaq’s big body was worth its weight in gold as a defender in the paint, you need to get them checked. Lastly on this note, any NBA decision-maker would rather have the best offensive player in the game, 10 out of 10 times, over the best defender in the game. Offense is king in such a fast-paced game, it’s just a basketball thing.
A wash from most other perspectives, you then rely solely on what your eyes tell you to make an overall judgment. I saw Tim Duncan fit a role and a position, while then proceeding to do that so well and at an unseen magnitude.
What we all saw Shaq do was obliterate the mold, change the game, and recreate the way that dominant big men were defended, deployed, and officiated. That is what makes him better.
Tim Duncan could be nullified if you studied him and were willing to outwork him in any given game, on any given night. Not that it happened all that much, but as his nickname in the Big Fundamental implies, he did the basics more superbly than anyone else ever had before him, which could be stopped if properly defended.
What Shaq did could not be nullified or defended. No matter what scheme you deployed, besides fouling the dickens out of him (see hack-Shaq) and hoping he missed the free throws (which he often did, facepalm.gif), you were simply at his mercy and his wrath. There was no stopping him for much of his career, there was withstanding him and hoping to be able to make up for it everywhere else.
That is why Shaq was better than Tim Duncan.