Shaq's 30%

Shaquille O'Neal has come out and said he was only 30% of the player he could have been. Well then. The big goof has it right in a lot more ways than one.

Few would question his free-throw shooting was about 30% of what it should have been. A team of masons couldn't throw up that many bricks. Pit--ee--ful.

From the field, Shaq was a regular dead-eye. Literally. Even a blind person could probably shoot outside shots as well as he did. Get the behemoth more than 10 feet away from the basket and there was no point in guarding him. Let him shoot. He can't make it.

Footspeed? Are we to believe he was only running at 30% of his capability? Or was he just flat-out slow naturally? Seismologists knew when Shaq was lumbering down the floor. The needles on the Richter scale twitched.

How about passing? While he likely didn't pass too many restaurants to keep up his enormous weight, Shaq wasn't so hot distributing the ball to his teammates. Like Kobe Bryant, once he got the ball it usually wasn't going anywhere else. 30% would be a high figure.

There are big men that can ball-handle (dribble). Shaq was decidedly not one of them. If he put it on the floor in traffic, there was only about a 30% chance he wouldn't get stripped of it. A clumsy ox trying to weave his way through a pack of svelte cheetahs comes to mind. Did I mention foot-speed?

And then there are all the moronic commercials he's appeared in over the years. Someone with about 30% of a brain knew to quickly change the channel or hit the "mute" button when his mug showed up on the air hawking a product. One is left to wonder just who the target audience of the sponsors was. The five and under crowd? Those in mental institutions? Any sane adult would find his pitches either offensive or laughable.

Speaking of sane adults.....  Maybe we only saw 30% of Shaq's smarts over the years. We can hope. Because if that was all he had in the "sharp" department, he may as well have been advertising bowling balls. Or nerf toys. Let's just say the Mensa people likely weren't impressed. Or even a half-crazed idiot like yours truly.

Add it all up and what do you have?

Give or take some sort of chuckle-head moment here or there -- 30% sounds about right.