Lakers News: Shaq, Phil Jackson Admits To Deflating Balls

In basketball, you’ll hear the phrase “They’re taking the air out of the ball.” It means that team is slowing the pace so as to limit the opportunities for their opponents to take advantage of some kind of mismatch. This very NBA Finals series, LeBron and the Cavaliers are slowing the pace to a near standstill due to the incredible talent gap between the two teams.

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Monday, Shaquille O’Neal and Phil Jackson made news by admitting that, during their playing and/or coaching careers, they deflated the basketballs for some kind of advantage, according to an ESPN story by Baxter Holmes.

Fortunately, there’s no way to prove whether they did so illegally, as so many years have passed since any infraction might have taken place, so we won’t have to bear update after update on balls. So, there’s that.

Here’s Shaq on the advantage soft balls gave him:

"“Sometimes, in the games during all my championship runs, if a ball was too hard, I let air out,” the former All-Star center said in a recent episode of “The Big Podcast With Shaq.” “I’d have a needle. A friend of mine would have a needle and I would get the game ball. … I needed that extra grip, but I wasn’t doing that for cheating purposes. I just needed the extra grip for my hands so I could palm it, a la Michael Jordan, the way he used to palm it.”"

Part of that deflation had to also take place on the court as Shaq clanked free throw after free throw, so part of that might be innocent, but if his Lakers gained some kind of advantage because Shaq’s balls had less air, opponents would have a legitimate gripe.

Jackson had a similar experience with balls:

"“What we used to do was deflate the ball,” [Phil Jackson] told the Chicago Tribune in a story published in 1986. “We were a short team with our big guys like Willis [Reed], our center, only about 6-8 and Jerry Lucas also 6-8, [Dave] DeBusschere, 6-6. So what we had to rely on was boxing out and hoping the rebound didn’t go long.“To help ensure that, we’d try to take some air out of the ball. You see, on the ball it says something like ‘inflate to 7 to 9 pounds.’ We’d all carry pins and take the air out to deaden the ball.”"

Jackson’s explanation came with an accompanying tweet clarifying that the balls his Knicks played with were legally soft.

Again, too much time has passed to prove anything about either Shaq’s of Jackson’s preferred ball size and softness. Really, the story was another opportunity to use the words “balls” at an obnoxious rate. Sports should be fun and we can only hope it continues to stay nearly as fun as this article was to write.