We haven’t had a really good sports media beef in a while, but fortunately, two of the biggest personalities (this is true figuratively and literally) are now going at it. Recently, Shaquille O’Neal expressed on Inside the NBA that he did not think Nikola Jokic deserved to be named MVP of the 2023-24 NBA season. While he loves Jokic, Shaq told the Denver Nuggets star directly that he thought the award deserved to go to Shai Gilgeous-Alexander of the Oklahoma City Thunder.
This did not sit especially well with Shannon Sharpe, who went onto his Nightcap podcast with Chad Johnson and Gilbert Arenas and expressed that he wasn’t a fan, going as far as saying that Shaq is “envious” of guys who win MVPs — he only won one in his career — and that “deep down,” Shaq is upset he never comes up in GOAT conversations.
“He robbed himself because he didn’t take it serious enough,” Sharpe said. “Did he take it serious? Not nearly as serious as he should have. Shaq should have five MVPs, Shaq should have seven titles, and I think he sees a guy like Nikola Jokic that’s not as dominant as him, he gets three in four years, and people are talking about him. And they talk about him, dominant big man. But see, when you’re historically great, they talk about you as great basketball player, the GOAT, and Shaq is never brought up.”
This is a frequent criticism of Shaq’s career, that he never put in the work necessary to achieve the heights he was capable of achieving (for what it’s worth, he’s admitted that he never worked especially hard in practices as a way to keep himself from putting more of a toll of on his body). Still, this came across the Hall of Fame inductee’s radar, so he decided to respond on Instagram by saying that Sharpe — a Hall of Fame inductee in his own right — essentially wasn’t good enough during his NFL career to comment here. And to really twist the knife, he tossed in a paraphrased Skip Bayless line that led to plenty of tension between Bayless and Sharpe when the two were co-hosts of Undisputed.
Once again, Sharpe addressed all of this on Nightcap and read most of Shaq’s IG comment before expressing that, while he wasn’t as good at football as Shaq was at basketball, he takes pride in knowing he maximized what he could do on the gridiron.
“I’ve never professed that I was as great as Shaq,” Sharpe said. “But I will say, I got what I got because I worked my ass off. Now, Shaq has been the one to say it, that he didn’t work as hard, he didn’t train as hard, he didn’t eat as well as he should have … Am I a top-100 player? No. Am I the equivalent, as a football player, as Shaq was as a basketball player? No. But what I did do is that I maximized that. And my question is, do you believe that you gave everything that you possibly could in basketball? Did you train the way you should have? Did you eat the way you should have? That just goes to show you how great you was, is that you allowed your weight to get out of control, the injuries started to creep up, and you got four rings, and you got three Finals MVPs … He’s the most dominant big man in the history of the game, and he got one MVP.”
Shaq got wind of this and didn’t appreciate what Sharpe had to say, as he posted a picture on IG and wrote “the daddy don’t usually respond but i got time today.” How Shaq ever has time to do anything will forever be a mystery to me, but after another post on IG where he promised a response and tagged Sharpe, Shaq dropped a diss track that put Sharpe’s analysis over a beat before he started going and said, among other things, Sharpe is “beneath me.”
A whole lot of people got tagged by Shaq in his caption, where he said “now i’m done with this. i’ll b at the bahamas crib if anyone needs me. wooooo what a week, first i found out they ain’t love me and now this.” and made clear he won’t sit down with Sharpe. We’ll see how much longer this ends up going on for, but I’m willing to bet that at some point, Sharpe’s First Take co-host and Shaq’s longtime friend Stephen A. Smith gets involved.
[h/t Awful Announcing]
