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Gary Payton told Shaquille O’Neal he couldn’t be No. 1 option on 2006 Heat: ‘You getting older’

While legendary NBA big man Shaquille O’Neal was still in the upper echelon of players in the league during his stint with the Miami Heat, he was in his 30s at that time and wasn’t the same game-breaking talent he was with the Los Angeles Lakers.

Fellow Hall of Famer Gary Payton told O’Neal as much when they were teammates on the Heat, with Payton explaining to O’Neal that the offense had to run through a young Dwyane Wade.

O’Neal was evidently able to make the plan work, and the strategy worked wonders for Miami. Wade was nearly unstoppable from a scoring standpoint in the 2006 NBA Playoffs, and the Heat won their first championship in franchise history that year.

“When we won in ’06 and I set a meeting and I told Shaq, I said, ‘Shaq, look, you getting older, man,'” Payton said. “‘We can’t go through you. … We got a young kid right here that you nicknamed Flash, and he rolling.’ And I said, ‘We gonna go through him.’ And when we went through him and he averaged 35 and then he started kicking the ball to us, trusting us, and we playing defense and we start knocking down shots, we start rolling.”

Payton seems to be referring to Wade’s scoring average during the 2006 NBA Finals, as Wade averaged 34.7 points per game while shooting 46.8 percent from the field against the Dallas Mavericks.

Wade played great basketball for the Heat throughout the 2006 NBA Playoffs, but he especially stepped his game up when the lights were at their brightest.

Just because Wade carried the brunt of the load on the offensive end of the floor for Miami doesn’t mean O’Neal wasn’t still very productive on that end, though. Across 23 appearances during Miami’s run to a championship, he averaged 18.4 points per game on 61.2 percent accuracy from the floor. He was the Heat’s second-leading scorer in those playoffs behind only Wade.

O’Neal’s sacrifice and willingness to defer to Wade helped him win the fourth and final title of his NBA career. He won the first three championships of his NBA stint while playing alongside another great former guard, Kobe Bryant, on the Lakers.

Wade, on the other hand, went on to win two more titles playing for the Heat organization, though O’Neal was long removed from his time in Miami by the time Wade reached the league’s mountaintop again. Wade won back-to-back titles in 2012 and 2013 while having stars LeBron James and Chris Bosh as his running mates.

Wade, O’Neal and Payton will forever be remembered by Heat fans for their contributions to that championship team in 2006.

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