Ranking the Candidates to Keep Shaq’s NBA Finals Association Streak Alive
Former teammates of The Big Diesel still playing in 2019–20.
One of the most incredible and most random streaks in sports involves the Hall of Fame center, Shaquille O’Neal. Every year since the 1983–84 NBA season, at least one player who at some point in their career was teammates with Shaq has made the NBA Finals.
That’s 36 seasons. Of course, Shaq himself only played 19 seasons. The Big Diesel was taken by the Orlando Magic with the #1 pick in the 1992 draft and then retired following the end of the 2010–11 season.
This means that for the years before Shaq entered the league, an NBA Finals participant would go onto play with Shaq, and for the last eight years, guys who played with an older O’Neal still played for championships.
And, of course, Shaq won four rings himself.
From the start of the streak and up until the 2018 NBA Finals, a teammate of Shaq had won the title every year, but that was snapped by that year’s Warriors team. O’Neal had played with Steve Kerr, who coaches the Warriors, but since he wasn’t a player, that streak technically ended at 34 years.
However, LeBron and Jeff Green were still on the losing Cavaliers that year, and with Danny Green playing on the championship-winning Raptors last season, Shaq has still played with someone who made every NBA Finals since 1984.
Luckily for us, and the streak, Shaq bounced around the league during the last few years of his career, and has even admitted to ring chasing. This means that despite his 2011 retirement, seven former teammates of Shaq remain in the league, and will attempt to keep his NBA Finals association streak alive.
Here they are, ranked by their likelihoods of reaching the NBA Finals this upcoming season.
7. Goran Dragić (Miami Heat)
All seven active former teammates of Shaq will almost certainly make the playoffs this season. Dragić was just a rookie in 2008–09 when he played with Shaq on the Phoenix Suns. Since, he has developed into one of the better guards in the league, and now at 33 years of age finds himself on the Miami Heat, where he’s played since early 2015.
The Heat finished just outside of the postseason last year, 10th in the East at 39–43, but are expected to make a jump following the free agency acquisition of Jimmy Butler. Miami has the potential to perhaps steal a first-round playoff series but should be overpowered by the more talented teams in their conference.
6. Jeff Green (Utah Jazz)
Jeff Green has turned into quite the journeyman player. After longer spells with the SuperSonics/Thunder and Celtics early in his career, the Jazz will be Green’s sixth team in the last five seasons. He was teammates with Shaq in O’Neal’s final season with the Celtics and is still looking for his first championship after falling just short in 2018.
Green has always put up decent numbers but has never been a guy you want to be one of your first options. Luckily, on the Jazz, he won’t have to. With a likely bench role behind forwards Joe Ingles and Bojan Bogdanović, and with Mike Conley, Donovan Mitchell, and Rudy Gobert filling out an impressive starting five, Green will have a chance to provide quality minutes for a dark horse title contender.
I’m pretty high on the Jazz, who currently hold the seventh-best title odds in the league. In such a stacked Western Conference, though, there are better bets for Shaq’s streak to continue.
2–5. LeBron James, Danny Green, Avery Bradley, Rajon Rondo (Los Angeles Lakers)
That’s right — the Lakers are a hotbed of active ex-Shaq teammates. James and Green teamed up with the Big Diesel on the Cavaliers, while Bradley and Rondo are remnants of Shaq’s days in Boston. Bradley was a rookie then, and is just 28 now, while Green (32), Rondo (33), and James (34), are entering the final years of their careers. All four will be major contributors for the Lakers this season.
L.A. assembled a championship contender this offseason from scratch, with LeBron as their centerpiece. After their huge trade for Anthony Davis, one by one, more players jumped on board. While we speculated whether the Lakers would even have enough money to form a team deep enough to compete, they created one of the deepest rosters in the league. They even pulled Dwight Howard back in.
The Lakers are now title favorites along with their arena rivals the Clippers. This team has one of the highest ceilings in the league, but there’s also a real possibility that the experiment doesn’t work out as intended. Maybe this team has a higher title percentage than the final squad on the list, but if the goal is just to make the NBA Finals, the West is too stacked for the Lakers to warrant the top spot.
1. Robin Lopez (Milwaukee Bucks)
Sideshow Bob teamed up with O’Neal in Phoenix, where the latter became the rare desert species known as The Big Shaqtus. Now after three years in Chicago, Lopez joins his brother Brook and reigning MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo in Milwaukee.
The Bucks finished the 2018–19 season with the best record in the NBA but fell in six games to the eventual champion Raptors in the Eastern Conference Finals. This year, they return essentially their entire rotation outside of Malcolm Brogdon, who signed a very healthy deal with the Pacers. Lopez and Wes Matthews were the team’s major acquisitions and should help a team with their sights set on a title.
Kawhi Leonard leaving the Raptors should take Toronto out of serious title contention, meaning Milwaukee’s main competition should be the Sixers, with the Nets and Celtics holding outside chances. The Bucks are the favorites to come out of the East and should be at worst the #2 seed entering the playoffs.
Who knows if they’ll win the title, but the Bucks have as good a chance as any team in the league of making it to the NBA Finals.
Connor Groel is a writer who studies sport management at the University of Texas at Austin. He also serves as editor of the Top Level Sports publication on Medium, and the host of the Connor Groel Sports podcast. You can follow Connor on Medium, Facebook, and Twitter, and view his archives at toplevelsports.net.
