Shaq ‘Warns’ Luka: ‘You Will Never Be Able To Escape My Shadow At Lakers!’
The Lakers once let a superstar go because he wouldn’t get into shape. Now they’ve bet everything on one who finally did.
Getty Images/Ringer illustration
The journey begins.
The Los Angeles Lakers used just those three words on their social media accounts on Saturday, echoing Luka Doncic’s announcement of his three-year, $165 million maximum extension with the team—a contract with a player option in the final year that, should he decline it, would make him eligible for the 10-year-veteran maximum extension, currently estimated at $417 million over five years. The journey begins. Curious wording, given that Doncic has already played 33 games in forum blue and gold. But sometimes semantics bow to a deeper, unavoidable truth. With Doncic’s blessing, Los Angeles has secured both its present and future. With those three words, the storied franchise has effectively announced a new era, one that has been consciously designed from the moment the Lakers made the most surprising trade the league has ever seen back in February.
Luka adds a certain novelty to the Lakers’ all-time constellation of cornerstone stars. For six decades, the franchise’s very best perimeter players (Elgin Baylor, Jerry West, Magic Johnson, and Kobe Bryant) have been homegrown lifers, whereas its defining interior titans (Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Shaquille O’Neal) were brought into orbit. LeBron James, in his omnipositionality, rendered the dividing line moot. And in so many ways, Luka follows in James’s footsteps—this time, as a mutation of what had been the order of things within the Lakers organization.
Doncic has the talent, style, and star power to simultaneously embody the spirit of the two greatest Lakers ever in Magic and Kobe. He has Magic’s magnetism, joy, and imagination, the touch and vision to create miracles out of thin air; he has the ruthless aggression and sense of on-court supremacy of Kobe, the ability and drive to do the hard thing the hard way—and less than two seasons ago, was just eight points shy of Kobe’s 81-point performance in 2006, which effectively stands as the NBA’s modern-day single-game scoring record.
And yet, amid his transformational summer in the lead-up to the extension signing, I can’t help but think of Doncic within a more specific context of Lakers history, his circumstantial connection to another defining Lakers star. As Luka is paraded as the literal picture of Men’s Health after years of questions about his commitment to physical conditioning, I’ve found myself thinking about how the factors that brought Doncic to L.A. in 2025 are the same ones that drove Shaq out in 2004. In that sense, Luka closes a loop in the organization that arose around the time he was born. (Lakers history doesn’t always repeat, but it often rhymes in the same AABB scheme that every one of Shaq’s rap tracks employs.)
The serious questions surrounding Shaq’s weight began in earnest in the fall of 1999, when O’Neal tipped the scales at 340 pounds during a mandatory weigh-in at training camp. He’d been cultivating mass in an effort to steel himself from an oncoming onslaught from opposing centers hacking at him every possession down the floor. “I’m not unhappy about it,” Lakers coach Phil Jackson told reporters at the time. “I’m not going to disagree with Shaq about those types of things because he gets fouled harder than anyone in the game. … But all the other parameters going into it, getting up and down the court, the idea that he’s had a knee that was injured two years ago, he’s had the stomach injury, all those things are better served if there’s less weight.”
Of course, that 1999-2000 season would go on to be arguably the best of Shaq’s career, a pivotal MVP-winning breakthrough, fully leveraging his overwhelming size and strength. It would be the first of three consecutive Finals MVP seasons—a feat that only he and Michael Jordan know anything about. Growing up, watching Shaq’s most dominant years was the first time I’d consciously decoupled peak athleticism from peak performance. Shaq’s LSU and Orlando Magic days were an otherworldly terror of unbridled explosiveness, but he couldn’t affect winning the way a much heftier, much slower Shaq could. But weight, fair or not, is always cast as a burden, even in a unique case like O’Neal’s. Since he was playing alongside Kobe, whose maniacal work ethic had quickly become legend, Shaq’s weight fluctuations became a marker for unseriousness when they could have just as easily been construed as a quasi-commitment to fortifying his castle walls. Lord knows those walls were constantly bombarded.
Similarly, Dallas had its first serious discussions about Luka’s weight a few years ago. “The Mavericks’ key figures have talked to Doncic about decreasing his preferred playing weight this summer,” Mavericks beat reporter Tim Cato wrote in 2023. It came amid buzz circulating online about Luka’s physique at the 2023 FIBA World Cup, looking as svelte as he does these days in L.A. The weight didn’t stay off—if it did, perhaps none of this [gesticulates wildly, trying to convey the entirety of the past six months]would have happened. Yet, of course, despite the rumblings and apparent conditioning issues, that 2023-24 season would go on to be the best of Luka’s career, culminating in an improbable Finals run, even though he was battling through a thoracic contusion, a right knee sprain, and left ankle soreness. Peak Luka, as we knew him, was doughy and hobbled. Is it so wrong to think that might just be the case?
If this beach bod world tour he’s been on holds him more accountable as far as maintaining his streamlined figure, perhaps Doncic will offer the Lakers organization and its fans something Shaq never could in his prime: an opportunity to fairly compare and contrast. For years, Shaq made summer headlines by going on intensive cardio workout plans or hiring an ex-Marine to work him into shape. But in his final five campaigns with the Lakers, Shaq came into every season heavier than the last, besieged by a nagging toe injury that he’d delayed surgery on. (Still, he was a top-five MVP candidate in four of those five seasons.)
O’Neal swore by coming into training camp at 75 percent and gradually working his way back up. “You can’t come into basketball season in game shape unless you play every day, and I couldn’t do that anymore without my body breaking down,” he wrote in his 2011 memoir. Doncic, on the other hand, has historically had the opposite problem: Summers have been spent playing basketball incessantly, if not for skills training, then for his country; he always arrived in game shape, but with additional mileage. It wasn’t the offseason that was the issue; it was the season itself. The all-consuming limitations of an NBA travel schedule exacerbated the effects of Doncic’s generous, growing-boy diet; never mind any injuries he’d accrue that would limit his time on the court.
Doncic in year eight offers a sort of wish fulfillment, a way to realize the imagined form of Luka in the minds of the basketball public. There are certain unquestionable benefits to carrying less weight on the court. Doncic may not suddenly transform into OG Anunoby, but he’ll have more energy to expend on the defensive end. Some of the latent explosiveness Doncic occasionally brandished in his early Dallas days could return. Luka dunked just twice last season: once with the Mavericks, once with the Lakers. He attempted 27 dunks in his rookie season, eight more tries than Doncic had in his past three seasons (19) combined. Luka’s first blow-by dunk at Crypto.com Arena this season might register a higher decibel reading than Ben Simmons’s first career 3-pointer at the Wells Fargo Center.
Luka’s camp has suggested that this transformation was always part of the plan, that it would have happened even if there hadn’t been an element of revenge from getting blindsided midseason. That makes sense—dudes can take a long-ass time to figure out what’s good for them! But hopefully the expectation of this grand resculpting project is centered on longevity: Doncic’s current average of 64 games played per season falls short of the NBA’s dreaded 65-game rule for awards qualification, but more importantly, we’ve seen what Luka can do in the playoffs—now, we want to see him do it in peak condition.
That endurance from April to June is more important than mining for speed and explosiveness that hadn’t previously been on display. The wonder in Doncic’s game has always been apparent, no matter his playing weight. There are few players in the world whose body and mind are as coordinated. The way he seamlessly transfers from a weightless behind-the-back dribble, adjusting the length and width of his strides, to delivering a thundering shoulder as a means of creating new passing windows or scoring opportunities—that’s where Luka Magic lies, at the intersection of grace and bewildering power.
There is an impulse to romanticize the road that athletes take to get closer to a Vitruvian ideal, but not everyone has access to the Giannis Antetokounmpo path. Admittedly, part of the joy in watching Luka’s development over the years has been observing how his talent shines irrespective of his body’s limitations in a given season. Speed kills, but it also fades; there is a sense that whatever governs Luka’s basketball mastery might be eternal.
“I think I was a good basketball player back then, no matter what people say,” Doncic recently said, perhaps alluding to rumors that he’d weighed as much as 270 pounds last season as a member of the Mavericks. “I think it was the next step in my career. At the end, I’m still 26 and I have a long way to go.”
Indeed, the Wonder Boy is 26. Old enough to know better, and young enough for that to matter. Like I said, there’s time to compare, contrast, and transpose these various versions of Luka. All the what-ifs anyone has had about Luka’s game can still be answered in his prime. If this is truly a revenge tour, we’ll see the fruits of his labor shortly. For Shaq, all the what-ifs only deepened with time. When the Lakers eventually found his conditioning untenable and unworthy of a long-term extension, they traded him to the Heat in 2004. In Miami, shedding weight was an act of revenge, sure, but it was also a mandate from the front office. Team president Pat Riley had installed his infamous body fat requirements for the Heat in those days: Guards had to be at 6 percent, forwards at 7 to 8 percent, and centers at 10 percent. In his final years with the Lakers, Shaq regularly hovered above 16 percent.
“Pat told me he wanted me slim, so what I did this summer, I just laid off the weights. My other summers have been weight, weight, weight,” Shaq told reporters in 2004. “Because I take a beating. I’m the NBA’s best NFL player, so I wanted to get real big and solid so I could take those beatings, and muscle weighs more than fat. But this summer, no weights, all cardio. Got that down to 335 and hopefully by the end of training camp, be 325, 330.”
Shaq’s listed weight in Miami was 325, and there were glowing accounts and reviews of his fitness then. But he hardly looks back at his time in Miami fondly. “There’s no question by trying to get my body fat down I became more injury-prone,” Shaq wrote in his memoir. “I never had any of the ticky-tacky injuries I got until I went to Miami. I had no cushion, no buffering. Pat forgot to take into account the pounding my body took, day in and day out, going for those rebounds he wanted me to get. I was too much of a power player to take that kind of abuse on that lean of a body. I had more injuries in my time with Miami than anywhere else in my career.”
The question of Shaq’s post-Lakers decline became a chicken-or-egg conundrum: Were his injury-marred seasons in Miami due to the lack of natural insulation he’d grown accustomed to in L.A., or was he suffering from the cumulative stress on his body at the knife’s edge of his gilded years? That’s a distinction between Shaq’s and Luka’s respective ousters: The Lakers got rid of a 32-year-old Shaq because they were afraid of his post-prime years; the Mavs got rid of a 25-year-old Luka because they were afraid of supporting his prime years. The former is defensible, even logical; the latter is losing a game of 4D chess against yourself.
Still, NBA summers are all about optics and PR battles. For all his health struggles in Miami to come, Shaq nailed his shot at revenge during his first season with the Heat, finishing as the MVP runner-up. Given how intent Luka and his representation are on publicizing this transformation across numerous media, Doncic has already secured a flawless victory. How that translates to the season is still in question. For all of the added attention this time around, Luka hasn’t really shown us anything we hadn’t already seen from him before. Will the rigors of the season fell him, as they have in the past, or has he built up the necessary resistance over these past three months? Not even Luka can know for sure at this stage. But in the meantime, what we do know is that in just half a year, Luka and the Lakers organization have found a common understanding that seemed to elude Doncic in Dallas. The Lakers went out of their way to show their trust in their newfound star; Doncic, in turn, rewarded them with a commitment—both in conditioning and on paper—that the Mavericks desperately wanted but ultimately denied themselves.
In a 2005 postseason interview with the late Lakers owner Jerry Buss, at the end of a campaign that saw the Lakers miss the playoffs for the first time in more than a decade, Buss was asked if he had any regrets about trading O’Neal.
“He’s 60 pounds lighter in Miami than he was in Los Angeles. 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 told reporters. “As you know, Shaq is in his middle-30s and it might be difficult to build around him. I suspect if I had known he was going to lose 60 pounds I probably would have made a different decision.”