Updated: Feb. 14, 2005, 5:30 AM ET
Heating up, staying cool
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By Marc Stein, ESPN.com
Marc Stein Archive
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It is still a shade too early to know exactly how
Shaquille O'Neal would react to the prospect of
Phil Jackson returning to the Lakers to coach
Kobe Bryant.
Yet he does have a ready response to the question his play had been generating before his old soap-opera pals in Hollywood reclaimed their usual spot at the forefront of the news.
The question: Are you pacing yourself for the playoffs, Shaq?
Shaq's answer: Don't ask.
"Maybe I am, maybe I'm not," Shaq told me the other night. "I know what I'm doing.
"I'm a cigar. Everyone else is a cigarette. I burn slower."
Translation: He's not going to change his approach, no matter who asks.
That includes
Stan Van Gundy, although Shaq is at least willing to discuss the matter with his coach. They met face-to-face recently after O'Neal announced that his only concern in the regular-season is securing a top-four seed, assuring home-court advantage in the first round of the playoffs. Van Gundy urged him not to make such proclamations, insisting that the Heat have no grounds to be so loose because "we've never been together" and thus have "no idea how good or bad we can be."
In Heat's last game, O'Neal scored 21 points and had 12 rebounds in 43 minutes as Miami defeated the
Portland Trail Blazers, 122-92.
You suspect Van Gundy's not fretting over Shaq's playoff-readiness. He knows O'Neal, at nearly 32, knows his body -- and how long the season can be -- better than anyone else in Miami. The coach's fear is that the rest of the Heat will embrace the flip-a-switch mentality that used to be such an issue in Lakerland.
O'Neal acknowledges Van Gundy's concerns but explains that he knows no other way to get through 82 games.
"I'm a cigar," he repeated. "I don't want to burn out fast."
Said teammate
Damon Jones, resurrecting the argument that O'Neal takes more punishment than we mortals can imagine: "I think [the criticism about coasting] irritates him a little bit only because he's not playing basketball out there, he's playing football. He has a wonderful life, on and off the basketball floor, but I would hate to be in his body.
Slow burn: Shaq knows the second
season is where his rep is made.
"If you watch him, he's getting up and down the floor. On at least 65, 70 percent of our possessions, he's trying to get great position down there. And the scheme we have defensively has him doing a lot of moving around and he's done a great job there, because defensively we're all right."