We got him to fix the one weakness that we had exposed last year. We had no single player that could slow down a strong center, and double-teaming was opening up the three pointer.

If he stays healthy, he provides the answer to that weakness.

watch the Cavs, or chooses to bias themselves against Shaq for some unobvious reason. He’s always been a good player, and has the footwork to help him in his older age. That and he’s actually a sound player when he wants to be, and thus far he’s wanted to be. Haven’t seen many bad games out of him, overall that is. (some games his offense leaves something to be desired, but he makes up for it on the other teams bigs)

I think certain analysts were using the early season +/- and drawing hasitly made conclusions. First, the Cavs did have trouble incorporating O’Neal into the offense and defense early in the season, I don’t think anyone would debate that and it certainly shows itself statistically. But they solved this problem and his recent play may be representative of that. Secondly, Basketball statistical analysis is far behind other sports, yet because these are the only measures we have to date, they sometimes are presented with more confidence than they should be. As you said, anyone watching or simply statistically analyzing the games against the Lakers and Magic would determine that O’Neal has made a difference, and being that Cleveland is now better geared to face these two teams (And my guess is Boston as well, excluding our first game of the season since O’Neal wasn’t incorporated into the system that well) that happen to be the teams favored to be roadblocks on the way to a championship, one can conclude that the addition of O’Neal has been a positive.

I like it.

I can see this making for a nice t-shirt, with a picture of Shaq dunking and blocking someone.