Shaquille O’Neal has always been a confident guy, so his comments to NBA’s Inside Stuff should surprise no one.
O’Neal, who’s enjoying life with TNT Sports, said that the Lakers would have won two more titles, and a total of five or six had he stayed with Kobe Bryant.
“Probably five,” O’Neal said Thursday on TNT’s “Inside Stuff.” “I’m going to go with five or six.”
O’Neal won three titles with Bryant and the Lakers in four trips to the NBA Finals. The Lakers eventually traded him to the Miami Heat in 2004.
Even with the public relationship issues Shaq and Kobe had, O’Neal says that’s not reason he left.
“We didn’t have a bad relationship, because we won three out of four championships,” O’Neal said. “That’s not a bad relationship at all.”
“It was a money situation, I was getting older,” he continued. “They wanted me to take less money. I wasn’t going to do that, so they traded me to Miami.”