Former Lakers Champ Snubs LA Hall Of Famer In Listing Best Big Man Teammate
Robert "Big Shot Bob" Horry, who won three of his seven (!) NBA titles with your Los Angeles Lakers from 2000-2002, has played with a litany of Hall of Fame big men.
In a recent interview, Horry revealed that he believes Hall of Fame Houston Rockets center Hakeem "The Dream" Olajuwon (with whom Horry won championships in 1994 and 1995), and not Hall of Fame Lakers center or Hall of Fame San Antonio Spurs power forward/center Tim Duncan (with whom Horry won titles in 2003 and 2005), was the best big man he's ever played alongside.
This is a bit bonkers, considering that Horry if anything should be a bit more pro-LA as an analyst for local Lakers broadcasts on Spectrum SportsNet. Then again, Duncan and Olajuwon are also incredible basketball immortals with similarly impressive resumes to O'Neal.
Horry recently hopped on Showtime's "All The Smoke" podcast alongside Stephen Jackson and his fellow ex-Laker Matt Barnes to make the revelatory statement.
"All the other teams I played for, the one common denominator was great big man," Horry reflected. "Think about Shaq, Tim Duncan, and if you said right now, 'Name the top five big men [ever],' I played with three of them."
"Dream [is] No. 1 by far," Horry declared. "Nobody [wants] to talk about it. I think you have these guys who are quiet. Think about it... Dream, he's a really quiet guy. You can't get him to do much, to say much. So we kind of veer away from him. We don't talk about him. But to me, if you look at what he put together -- Defensive Player of the Year, MVP in one season, all-time leading shot blocker, those things... You look at his history and what he's done for the game... So I think... his body of work was just incredible."
One big caveat on the shot-blocking front: shot-blocking wasn't recorded until the 1973–74 season, meaning that two Hall of Fame Lakers who feasibly could have laid claim to that honor were snubbed for some (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) or all (Wilt Chamberlain) of their careers. Boston Celtics legend Bill Russell and Chamberlain seem like the likeliest candidates to have displaced Olajuwon from his status as the NBA's all-time block leader.
Horry, a 6'10" combo forward out of the University of Alabama, suited up for 16 seasons as one of the league's ultimate floor-spacing stretch four role players.
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