Shaquille O'neal a celtic?

Shaquille O'Neal a Celtic?

By Kelly Dwyer

So this is where Shaquille O'Neal(notes) comes to hide.

Actually, he's not hiding at all. He's not flying low to the ground and he's not slumming. Short of zooming back to Los Angeles (hard to do on a burned bridge) or Miami (ditto), he's signed with the most storied franchise this league has. One of the more popular, one of the most prominent and one of two that you last saw playing official hoops a month and a half ago. The Celtics.

Shaq in Boston, sportin' the green. Chasing that ring, we'd assume. Chasing down prominence, again. From Kobe to Wade to LeBron. Now in with a series of like-minded fogies. Boston? I suppose it makes sense.

Kendrick Perkins(notes), Boston's dutiful defensive-minded pivot man, will be out until at least January. The team signed Jermaine O'Neal(notes), but (hopefully) with the knowledge that his 2009-10 rebirth appeared to slide closer toward the spires of flukedom than an actual recharge. Rasheed Wallace(notes) is trade bait, Shelden Williams(notes) is no more. The C's need a center.

And it's almost sad that they're turning to Shaq.

Because O'Neal, at this point, is probably better off working as an entertainer of sorts than someone who should be hedging on Mike Conley(notes) Jr. on some random Wednesday in January.

You saw those games last year. Shaq didn't really look that bad. He looked like ... Shaq. Big guy, one move, two pivots, two hands. To the naked eye, O'Neal looked like a late-30s version of himself. He looked like what you would expect.

It's just that all these raw stats tell you that the Cavs were so, so much better with O'Neal on the pine. That when things weren't Shaq-centric, Cleveland tended to dominate. The easy answer to that? Don't pass Shaq the ball. Don't make him Shaq-centric. To these eyes, Cleveland didn't. And yet, the team's offense stunk with him out there. Tom Haberstroh nailed the best part of it last week: