Shaquille O’Neal Fought for His Slam Dunk Statue, Recounts Years-Old Dispute With $6.4 Billion Worth Lakers

Allen Iverson’s much-awaited statue outside the Wells Fargo Center was revealed just a few days back. While Iverson finally got his place on the Walk of Fame, many were in denial looking at the size of the sculpture. Shaquille O’Neal shared his thoughts about this on his show The Big Podcast where he surprisingly revealed how he demanded the design for his statue outside the Crypto.com Arena. The 4x champion also shared why he was adamant with the Los Angeles Lakers about it. 

There are a lot of designs that you can think of when it comes to a statue of Shaquille O’Neal. However, the Big Diesel wanted only one thing. He shared in his podcast, “When they did my statue in LA, I was like I don’t want statue in the front. I wanted my dunk man emblem hanging off the side of the building. And for years we fought on that. Well, like I don’t want one of you to put it out in front. If you go to LA Staples Center, you see my Dunk Man emblem on the side of the building. You got people taking pictures.”

Arguably, Shaq has one of the best statues in the NBA. It’s unique and like Shaq said, it is hanging off a wall, which makes it a standalone. No other NBA icon has a statue like Shaq’s. An important reason why Big Diesel went with this decision was so that fans could take good pictures and admire the big sculpture. While many did not like what Iverson got outside Philadelphia, Shaq was surprisingly a fan of it. 

Shaquille O’Neal approves the controversial Allen Iverson statue

Iverson was immortalized at Philadelphia three days ago and fans had a lot to say about it. For starters, the statue was very small in size, when compared with the other sculptures outside Wells Fargo Center. Also, some had a different design in their mind, although Iverson is widely known for his iconic crossover. However, Shaq is glad that the Philadelphia 76ers went with the crossover as the design. 

He said, “He[Iverson] is a legendary figure that would never be forgotten. You talk about data right, if you put a nice crossover thing, fans could take pictures, in front of it getting crossed over.” On the contrary, former NBA players like Jamal Crawford and Matt Barnes were not fans of the statue. Crawford wrote on Twitter, “The Sixers should be ashamed of themselves with the size of that statue!”, while Barnes shared in an interview, “76ers organization, y’all gotta do better than that, especially for bro. That s*** is terrible”. It looks like only Shaq is in awe of the crossover.