Shaquille O’Neal is an incredibly successful man in a variety of disciplines and pursuits — as long as those pursuits don’t involve releasing a basketball while a moderate or long distance from the hoop, and needing it to go in.
In the paint, he was force to be reckoned with. Outside of it, physics and gravity handled the reckoning just fine. Given that he was a historically bad free-throw shooter, barely better than a coin flip at 52.7 percent in his career, you could guess that he was even worse at shots he wasn’t allowed to take a couple seconds to prepare for.
What I’m saying is, Shaquille O’Neal shares absolutely zero genes from the Splash Brothers family line.
Don’t Miss
The thing is, it didn’t really matter. You don’t need to be a shot creator when you’re basically a basketball golem built to destroy the world’s rims. Some NBA big men develop their three-point shot in order to draw defenders out of the paint. Shaq just didn’t need to worry about defenders. He has four championship rings with two teams, played for almost two decades and is one of the greatest big men in basketball history. A path that didn’t involve him needing to throw it up from deep.
I’m fascinated by Shaq’s three-pointer stats, though, not because I’m imagining what being a passable shooter could have brought to his game, but because the number of three-pointers Shaq made, over the course of 19 years, is the funniest possible number: one.
Shutterstock
Zero wouldn’t be that unexpected. Kinda funny, but straightforward: the guy can’t shoot. Two or three, or somewhere in the single digits? Hey, broken clock, twice a day.
But one? One single, blessed shot, that, thanks to the alignment of the moon and the tides and perhaps a stray breeze wafting in from the concourse, managed to find its way into the hoop from beyond the arc? It’s incredible. I hope he took that game ball home like an NFL player with their first touchdown. There’s magic in that ball, and he should have absorbed energy from it Monstars-style before every free throw.
“How many three-pointers did he even attempt?” you might ask, joylessly.
I have that number for you too: 22. Just over a single three-pointer a season. Definitely not the largest sample size, but still large enough to prove that A) Shaq is god-awful at three-pointers; and B) this shot was special. It forever saved him from a devastating 0 percent career three-pointer percentage, elevating it ever so slightly from nil to 4.5 percent.
Without any further ado, here’s Shaq’s single successful three-pointer, in a 1996 game when his Orlando Magic played the Milwaukee Bucks. It’s a deep three, it’s a buzzer-beater, and it’s, of course, off glass.