Shaq thinks his Lakers could beat today's Warriors, Steph Curry says 'he's dead wrong'
Until a time machine is invented, it’s hard to know if teams from today could beat the dominant teams of the past. But that’s not stopping retired NBA legend Shaquille O’Neal and Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry from trading jabs about whether Shaq’s Lakers teams could beat Curry’s Warriors.
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Shaq thinks his 2000s Lakers could beat the Warriors
Shaq has a lot of pride in the Lakers teams from 2000-2002, and rightly so. They’re the only team since that time to win three straight NBA championships, and the 2001 Lakers were nearly perfect in the playoffs. So when USA Today called him up and asked him if his Lakers were better than today’s Warriors, Shaq spoke his truth.
“I think we’d easily win,” O’Neal told USA TODAY Sports by phone when asked which team was better. “Other people might feel different, they (the Warriors) might feel different. But we had one of the best teams of all-time in 2001 when we went 15-1 in the playoffs. We would’ve gone 16-0 but A.I. (Hall of famer Allen Iverson) went off on us and stepped over (former Laker) Ty Lue.”
The only game the 2001 Lakers lost in the entirety of the playoffs was to the Philadelphia 76ers in the finals. Allen Iverson, who won MVP that year, stopped the Sixers from being swept by the Lakers with a dominant 48-point performance. And the now-legendary step over of Tyronn Lue, of course.
Surprise! Steph Curry thinks his Warriors are better
Shockingly (not really), Curry didn’t agree with Shaq’s assessment that the early 2000s Lakers could easily beat the Warriors of today. Here’s what he told ESPN:
“Oh, he’s dead wrong,” Curry told ESPN, with a confident smile, prior to Wednesday night’s game against the Toronto Raptors. “Of course. We’d beat them. We can go back-and-forth all day.”
Curry was quick to defend the Warriors, but he also made it clear that there’s no way to ever know for sure. He and Shaq could go round and round, but they’d never come to a definitive conclusion. In fact, Curry told ESPN that he doesn’t like comparing teams from different eras.
“For me, I think it’s a tough conversation because I’ve always found it hard to compare eras to each other. […] I saw Shaq today talked about his three-peat championship team would have destroyed us for whatever reason. All those conversations are just entertaining because (1) who knows? (2) the game is so different. Teams that dominated their respective eras need to be left alone in terms of what that means. Hopefully that’s how they’ll approach us when they talk about us 20, 30 years from now looking back.”
The one thing that Shaq’s early 2000s Lakers teams have over the Warriors is championships. The Lakers won three straight from 2000 to 2002, and no team has done that since. But the Warriors are close. They’ve won two championships in a row, and even though we’re just one-third of the way through the NBA season, it looks like the Warriors could be headed back to the playoffs again.
One thing is for sure, though: even if the Warriors manage to win a third straight NBA championship, the debate over these two super teams will never end.
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