Shaquille O'Neal recently sat down with Ashley Nevel. It was a wide ranging and informative conversation with Shaq providing many opinions on today's NBA. He shared how Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was particularly tough on him as a young player and how their relationship was rocky during Shaq's playing days. He also said that he now gets along great with Kareem after learning that the reason he was so hard on him was to motivate and make Shaq better. Shaq now says he himself is deliberately tough on players to inspire greatness.

The NBA draft lottery has seemingly always been ripe with conspiracy theories. We can go back to 1985 and the various stories of a frozen envelope that led to the Knicks getting Patrick Ewing.

Just seven years later, Shaq was set to jump to the NBA after two dominant seasons with the LSU Tigers. In the interview with Ashley, O'Neal certainly added fuel to NBA draft lottery drama. He said, "I don't know if you heard this story but, in 1992...I meet Mr. [David] Stern in March. And he says to me, 'Hey, can't wait for you to come to the NBA.' Then he pulls me to the side and says, 'Do you want to play where it's cold or where it's hot?' He asked me that and I was like, ha! And he smiled and I smiled and then a couple of days later they had the draft thing...Minnesota was number three, and then Charlotte was number two and then Orlando, Florida was number one...I didn't think about it but you hear a lot of these conspiracy theories, you know there's a lot of situations that can make these things sound good...it's very interesting how it all played out."

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