(Barry Gossage/NBAE/Getty Images)
Shaquille O’Neal continues to amaze! In fact, let’s upgrade that to exponentially amaze! It was pretty amazing earlier this year when the 37-year-old center turned the clock back to his glory year in Miami, but now he seems to have turned it all the way back to his glory years in Los Angeles when he and Kobe were winning all those titles.
Sunday he followed up his 45-point assault on the Raptors with a 33-point output against the Lakers to power the Suns to not only their most satisfying victory of the year but perhaps the most significant one.
It’s hard to overstate what Shaq’s comeback of the ages (considering his age) means to the Suns. When he first got here, and even earlier this year, there was grumbling that while his numbers weren’t all that bad the problem was he no longer commanded double teams, and that took some of the flow out of the offense.
But the way he’s playing now forces teams to pick their poison – double and even triple team the Big Methuselah and free up the his teammates for great looks, or single cover him and let him dunk you to death.
And what this means is that maybe the citizens of Planet Orange can start dreaming a little bigger. Three weeks ago there was despair the team was headed for the lottery. Then, with the Gentry era off to such a promising start the hope was they could sneak into the eighth playoff spot.
And now? Well, watching the way Shaq had opened things up, even without Steve Nash and Amar’e Stoudemire, maybe they can think not only a higher seed but much more than a token appearance in the playoffs. After all, the Suns are only three losses out of the fourth seed.
It isn’t just Shaq’s power surge that’s amazing. The power never really went away. What’s really impressive is how nimble he is in his old age (especially for his old size) and how his touch has come all the way back. It wasn’t that long ago that he was considered to have developed cement feet in his basketball dotage, but while I know you still couldn’t call him the Big Nijinsky, I’m just sayin’.
And in some ways, the play of his fellow member of the geriatric set, Grant Hill, is just as surprising. The prevailing wisdom was that a string of injuries had pretty much ended his career as a front-line player, but he’s been the team’s steadiest player all year, and the injuries to Amar’e and Nash have underscored just how valuable his multiple skills are. And like Shaq, he too is playing some of his most productive basketball in years, and has become something of an iron man in the bargain.
For two guys widely considered to be on the twilight side of the mountain, if not over the hill (no pun intended) these guys are putting on quite a show. And when the third member of the team’s way over 30 club, Nash, comes back this could yet turn into the Year of the Senior Citizen in the West.
In some ways this game validated some of the numbers the Suns put up in the first few games of the Gentry era. The tendency had been to shrug them off considering the small (tiny even) caliber of the competition, but this was the LAKERS and Kobe, though not necessarily in that order. Bryant scored 49 points Sunday and was the game’s leading rebounder with 11. In fact, he and Pau Gasol scored 79 of their team’s 111 points. (Of course they also took 54 of the team’s 94 shots). Kobe, in fact, went on a 17-point tear in the first 7 minutes of the third period to wipe out a deficit that had reached as high as 15 points and propel the Lakers into a five-point lead.
When Shaq’s playing at his pre-Miami level, he makes everybody around him that much more effective, and one of the beneficiaries of his presence was Matt Barnes. Barnes has been somewhat of a disappointment, but he came up large Sunday with 26 points, 10 rebounds, and 7 assists. And it was his three-pointer with two minutes left that pretty much sealed the deal.
The bottom line: With the stars on both sides shining brightly this was a great show Sunday, and of course it didn’t hurt that the home team won. However, I’m still trying to figure out how so many Laker fans manage to get tickets to see their team here. Or are that many Suns’ season ticket holders actually closet Laker fans, or what? I’m going with “or what”.
