Buss Isn't the Heavy in Squabble With Shaq

<div class="quote_poster">Quote:</div><div class="quote_post">DO YOU know what it's like to have a conversation with someone who ignores the facts? (Try talking to yourself in the mirror.)

Laker fans are furious their consistently successful team tanked this season, and they want someone to blame. Hard to blast a giant of a man with a childlike sense of humor who might win another NBA title in another month.

That leaves Buss, Bryant and Kupchak looking like the Three Stooges in the middle of all the chaos, with Bryant and Kupchak hard to warm up to these days ? if any day, for that matter.

Buss, though, explained himself last week, and I don't understand how any knowledgeable Laker fan could still disagree with him.

"[Shaq is] 60 pounds lighter in Miami than he was in Los Angeles," Buss said. "And as you've probably gathered recently, he seems to be having some [health] problems. My reaction was, if he was not willing to get in shape, which he had five, eight years, some number of times to do, and we urged him. It seems that the motivation for him to lose weight was to trade him."

Buss was the guy paying Shaq twenty-some-million dollars while getting less than the best from O'Neal, who still had two years remaining on his contract and who wanted a two-year, $60-million contract extension right then and now.

Shaq wanted to be traded because he wasn't getting his way.

It's easy to spend Buss' money, and hard to argue that Shaq isn't a dominating player when at his best, but how often did Buss get the best from him in the last few seasons? Shaq was due to be paid $27.6 million this season, according to published reports, and that still wasn't enough to make him happy?

And you remain sympathetic to his side ? get over it.

When Shaq began the 2003 exhibition season running up the court in Hawaii and yelling at Buss, "Now you gonna pay me?" Shaq was a tub. Had he been 60 pounds lighter at the time, the Lakers might have gone on to easily win another title. And another. But he wasn't in shape, and he was getting older.

As a businessman, what would you have done? Why is this so hard to understand? I feel like I'm talking to the wife.</div>

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