we needed a TRUE CENTER, SEE?! We weren’t GOING TO WIN without SHAQ! He was the ANSWER! And he’s just…..MISUNDERSTOOD!

LEAVE SHAQ ALONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sigh. This trade has negatively impacted my happiness.

I’ve been on-board with the Shaq deal since day one (ok, maybe day 2), but there’s really only side of the fence on this. Profanity-laced raps about your former teammate are one thing, childish perhaps, but ultimately really neither here nor there. Profanity-laced (and grammatically horrifying) email threats, on the other hand are a complete non-starter.

I’m not sure quite what you’re getting at with the “self-righteous fan” angle, but assuming that the “alleged” incidents really happened, there’s no excusing it. I couldn’t care less about how many co-eds Boris gets freaky with in downtown Tempe, or if Josh Howard spends his summer inhaling Jamaica’s number one home-grown export, but I’ll draw the line at behavior that’s abusive towards fellow humans—whether it’s threatening a hit squad or throwing french fries (and fists). If that makes me self-righteous, I’m guilty as charged.

You don’t like, Shaq. Fine. But really this is too much. There’s no exceptions to the ignoring the personal lives of athletes rule. You can’t watch sports without it.

Shaq is harassing an ex-girlfriend. That’s not cool. Shaq gets paid 20M dollars to play basketball whie 30M households in this country live in poverty. That’s egregious.

If you want to take the moral high ground, stop cheering on the brats we call athletes as any of them, if they had any kind of decency, would donate 3/4 of their salaries to the poor. I don’t look at any human as decent who can make a million dollars and keep it all.

So is Shaq an ass? Probably, but what else do you expect? The whole idea of professional sports in morally indulgent. You can’t get around that. Picking out specific acts by the athletes is like dusting off dirt on a pile of crap.

Till the beginning of the new season, but now I’m curious as to how you guys will react to this. I am surprised by this espically after I read this awhile ago.

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hn8D1S6ga8VEDsuvy9o8_sqIG5FwD92I8UG00

Would he keep Shaq around after this, providing it’s true? I’m not so sure. He got rid of Kidd, our saviour from Starbury, when he roughed up Joumana….

on the deal. Hated Marion leaving, but knew something had to be done. So here we are, Shaq aint going anywhere. So we better get use to it. Probably suit up for what 55 games next year?
 Shaq needs to focus on the court, but when your throwin down big bling, boys will play and get in trouble.

Colangelo still casts a large shadow, but sadly (and ironically, like Shaq) his real influence is not what it was. Time will tell if Sarver and Kerr will run the same type of organization and hold “character issues” in the same regard that the Cs did. Those on this board with some Suns history will recall that it was a cocaine scandal on the team that created the situation that allowed Jerry to buy the team in the first place, and he set the tone early on that it was going to be a clean team.

I’m sure that Sarver and Kerr will address the situation with Shaq, but the reality is that he’s a 36yr old multi-millionaire, playing out the string on the last 2 years and $40 mill on what everyone knows is the final contract of his hall of fame career. It’s going to fall on his own personal sense of preserving whatever is left of his legacy to stop making these sorts of headlines.

Well, I didn’t know much about shaq before he came to phx, i only had time to follow the suns, not the entire league, exceptions have been here and there (like bird, jordan, and now oden) but not shaq.

I enjoyed much of his humor, and his effort during his first yr with the suns. I think we all agree something had to be done with marion, but to go from getting close to kg to getting shaq was a shame. I approved the trade and hoped for the best, it’s possible, but unlikely next yr will be better with Shaq, but, in hindsight, purely on his freethrow shooting, I wouldn’t make the trade. What’d shaq miss, like 15 of 30+ free throws in the spurs series, seriously, and we lost 2-3 of those games by a very slim margin.

On Allen Iverson thug comparison, really, that’s a bad comparison. Your basing the shaq is a thug idea on hearsay from an upset wife. It’s most likely they’re both messed up. But saying shaq is a thug, I would not say that. He actually passes, unlike Iverson, and gets hacked and beatup more than any other player on the court (easily), and takes it.

It’s real simple, the trade for shaq was close to working, it really was, if he could’ve shot 75% consistently, or higher from the free throw line, I think we would’ve won it all. The problem is, what’s to stop another team from doing the hack a shaq like popovich did, nothing….look at amare and what a great free throw shooter he has become, I mean wow! With this is mind, I think shaq will be best used 20-25 min a game an no more, and for 20 million, thats not good.

Amare would’ve really been useful to this olympic team, too bad he missed this, but lets face it, Amare has never been very bright.

Final note, the comments shaq makes that are not funny, but simply rude/negative, that stuff I could do without, but often his humor is not of that type, often it’s just plain silly, that’s the shaq I like.

I get your point. You are probably going to shoot me but i’m still confident that Shaq can help us. You just gotta remember that stretch were we beat SA and Golden State in the same week. With a full training camp, with the new (defensive minded)coach and new players…I think they can still make a run for it!

As old as Shaq is, he can still help. And about his personal issues, rapping and restraining orders… I really don’t care, as long as it doesn’t hurt the team.