Shaquille O’Neal made no secret of his longtime desire to be an NBA team owner. Unlike Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan, he’s not ventured into other sports leagues. Recently, he’s playing with the idea of forming an ownership group with former Mavs shot-caller, Mark Cuban. Somedays, however, he’s either keen on collaborating with LeBron James or beating him to a Las Vegas expansion team. Before the Orlando Magic retired his jersey this year, he hoped the DeVos family would let him into the ownership team. With the way he talks about this unfulfilled dream, it’s easy to forget that Shaq did come pretty close.

O’Neal once had a minority stake in the Sacramento Kings, his biggest rival during his Lakers prime. There was no animosity under his ownership, though. And Shaq may have been responsible for keeping the team in the city a decade before they signed his son.

Shaquille O’Neal kept his rivals in the West

Any Sacramento native and Kings fan would remember the dark time between 2006 to 2013. In that period, Shaquille O’Neal was hopping from team to team, and the NBA was on the verge of relocating the Kings to Seattle. The city kept fighting against the relocation under Kevin Johnson, a former NBA All-Star who was the mayor of Sacramento at the time.

Johnson and then NBA commissioner, David Stern, persuaded a new owner, Vivek Ranadive’s group, to buy the team and keep it in the city. Ranadive wanted to rebrand the Kings like its counterparts in California. So in 2013, he brought in a branding extraordinaire with NBA know-how and the Kings’ biggest rival – Shaquille O’Neal.

Big Diesel had only retired two years ago, and was an NBA analyst on TNT, along with his usual endorsement machine. He bought a minority stake in the Kings, though the exact percentage or the investment is not known. The Kings were valued at an estimated $525 million back then.

Raising the franchise value was not the only thing on Shaq’s to-do list. The Kings had selected DeMarcus Cousins in the first round of the 2010 draft. O’Neal wanted to mentor him personally (although Boogie argues Shaq was out to break his back).

‘Shaq the team owner’ didn’t stand out as much as ‘Shaq the podcaster’ or ‘Shaq the businessman’. After a lowkey 10-year tenure, he decided to exit the team. O’Neal expressed his intent to leave the Kings ownership in 2021 and by 2022 he had officially cashed out. The team value had at least quadrupled to $2 billion by then. But he’s attached to his first ownership stint.

Shaq made a quiet exit from the Kings

“It was awesome,” O’Neal said about the stint. “To just be in that position to have a piece of a team…I was a silent guy, though. I didn’t want to come and stand in the tunnel and tell Vivek ‘Do this, trade this guy, do that.’ Hopefully, that will come in the future.”

Shaq chose to divest from the Kings when another business opportunity came up. Around that time, he had turned Big Chicken into a franchise company with 300+ locations in development nationwide. He had just joined the board of Papa John’s too (he left in 2024), and had taken his EDM interests to a new level with a festival of his own. With everything going on, Shaq couldn’t keep up his commitment to the Kings and left without a fuss.

Interestingly, whenDeMarcus Cousins alleged that the Kings didn’t do anything for his career, Shaq came to the Kings’ defense. “In order to be recognized as a great player, you gotta have a certain attitude. Like, you know, to say, ‘Oh, they didn’t do nothing for me,’ what were they supposed to do for you? … You never took them to the playoffs. A lot of people act like they are great but don’t really know what it takes to be great.”

Three years in, O’Neal’s dream to invest in an NBA team has not waned. He has not gone into other sports nor has he been clear about going into the WNBA ownership. But he has been subtly building up to a larger ownership plan.

With the NBA planning for future expansion, Las Vegas might possibly have its own team. O’Neal has a wide variety of business interests in the entertainment capital and he wants to add an NBA team to it. However, so is LeBron James. Shaq initially dismissed all suggestions to partner with Bron. But lately has been open to it if Mark Cuban joined too.

In the meantime, he doesn’t accept Sacramento slander even from Charles Barkley. Now that his son, Shareef O’Neal has signed a $1.1 million deal for one year with the Kings, it will be interesting to see what Shaq and Chuck say when Shareef makes his NBA debut on TNT.