Shaquille O'Neal turns back the clock in vintage performance
Shaquille O’Neal, the 38-year-old starting centre for the Boston Celtics, put in a vintage performance in the Celtics’ most recent win over the New Jersey Nets, scoring 25 points on 9-for-10
shooting to go along with 11 rebounds.
For a while, O’Neal looked eerily similar to the player he was during his prime years, when he averaged at least 26 points and 10 rebounds for 10 straight seasons beginning with the 1993-94
season, never shooting worse than 56 percent from the field during this career-defining stretch. And at his age now, the Celtics will take whatever they can get from the future Hall-of-Famer.
“Well, he [O’Neal] has his family in town, so that’s tough to beat," Celtics forward Kevin Garnett told reporters after the game. "I know he’s a huge family guy. His family’s not always
with him, so maybe he got like a boost of adrenaline from his family or something, but he looked great. He looked like the 2000 Shaq -- the ’99 Shaq, the 2001 to 2002 to 2003 to 2004 to 2005 to 2006. He looked fresh tonight. He looked really good.”
As O’Neal slowly makes his way towards retirement, his numbers have taken a severe hit over the past few years. He averaged a mere 12.0 points and 6.7 rebounds last season with this season’s
numbers at 11.9 and 6.8 over 10 games. But O’Neal wants to try for one more NBA championship with the reigning Eastern Conference champions and said he’ll do whatever he can to contribute.
"I gotta thank my team-mates because I don't get a lot of plays called, but guys are penetrating and they're dropping it off to me, and I'm just finishing," said O'Neal. "I score whenever
they need me to. But I just play hard, do the little things that I was brought here to do. Do whatever Boston needs me to do; whatever [coach] Doc [Rivers] needs me to do."
For Rivers, he may have had a flashback or two during the game. “That was the young one," he said of O’Neal’s performance. "He was just good. He had great energy.”
The Celtics (11-4) host the Toronto Raptors (6-9) on Friday 26 November at the TD Garden.
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