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Who finished ahead of him: Allen Iverson, Tim Duncan
In 2000-01, Shaquille O’Neal averaged 28.7 points, 12.7 rebounds, 3.7 assists and 2.8 blocks on a league-leading 57.2 percent shooting mark.
And didn’t win MVP.
The reigning NBA champion Lakers that season sort of sleptwalked through the regular season, going just 56-26 that campaign, which would be an excellent year for most teams, but not really for the three-peat L.A. teams of the early 2000s. As such, O’Neal was snubbed for MVP honors in favor of Allen Iverson, who led the league in scoring that season at 31.3 points per game for a 56-win Philadelphia team, and in favor of Tim Duncan, who averaged 22.2 points, 12.2 rebounds, 3.0 assists and 2.3 blocks while appearing in all 82 games for a 58-win San Antonio squad.
Of course, O’Neal showed everyone who the best player was that postseason when he led the Lakers to a second-straight championship, sweeping Duncan in the Western Conference Finals and then defeating Iverson in the Finals four games to one all while eventually earning Finals MVP honors.
O’Neal was none too happy about not winning MVP, going off on the media about how the award was given away by March of that year. He even seemed to throw a bit of shade at Iverson, saying that if he shot 50 times per game, he’d average 100 points (considering how unstoppable prime Shaq was, he might not have been wrong, either):
His reign will end with the announcement that Allen Iverson or Chris Webber, or even Tim Duncan, is this year’s winner, by all appearances. In fact, there is an assumption throughout the league that Iverson has already won it, and indeed he might have, as the ballots were due this week. “You guys gave the award away in March,” O’Neal said Friday, “because somebody was doing good. There’s a lot of people doing good.” …. “If I take 50 shots a game, I’m going to average a hundred,” O’Neal said..
O’Neal also said if he didn’t win the award unanimously, he didn’t want it:
He blames the media, and he swears he doesn’t want “a sympathy man’s award.” “If I can’t win that award unanimously, or close to unanimous, I don’t want it,” he said. Asked why, he said, “Because I don’t know what you guys look for. If you look for percentages. If you look for consistencies. I have no idea what you look for, and it really doesn’t matter.”
The voters seemed to take him up on that, as O’Neal finished third in the vote.
Regardless, it’s pretty ridiculous that O’Neal, a four-time champion and three-time Finals MVP, finished with one regular-season MVP award in his career. Maybe similarly to a certain modern Nuggets star, O’Neal didn’t get as much MVP love as he deserved because it was so obvious he was the best player in the league that he got looked over when it came time to actually vote for MVP.