Shaq’s been great, but he’s not an All-Star

Shaquille O'Neal has been productive in limited minutes for Boston. (Brian Babineau/NBAE via Getty Images)

A growing chorus of folks, led by ESPN analysts Jeff Van Gundy and Mark Jackson, are suggesting that Shaquille O’Neal deserves consideration for the All-Star Game. Those people are wrong.

They are right, however, that Shaq is enjoying a fantastic season in Boston. But he’s not an All-Star, not in the same conference this season as fellow centers Dwight Howard, Al Horford, Roy Hibbert, Joakim Noah and Andrew Bogut, not when he’s logging only 22 minutes per game, and not when the Celtics have to get an even greater effort than usual from Kevin Garnett (and others) to make up for O’Neal’s defensive limitations.

All of that said, O’Neal, who is averaging 11.2 points (on 68.7 percent shooting) and 6.4 rebounds, has been so much better than expected. All you heard before last season was how Shaq was going to clog the lane and interfere with LeBron James’ drives to the basket in Cleveland. Has the lane in Boston seemed clogged to you this season? It hasn’t, and it’s because the Celtics have a more dynamic roster than those Cavaliers had, and because Doc Rivers has been smart enough not to utilize Shaq as a back-down post-up threat as if it were still 2002. Tom Haberstroh of ESPN.com detailed this beautifully Wednesday, so I won’t belabor it here. Suffice it to say that the Celtics rarely feed Shaq in the post at the beginning of the shot clock; instead, they run their offense as usual, asking him to set some screens along the baseline and be ready at the edge of the paint if and when his man moves to help on Rajon Rondo or jump out on a Ray Allen curl.

This not to say that O’Neal is just standing around, letting others do all the work for him. It’s not an easy thing to slide to the right spot, jump and finish a lob from Rondo — especially when you’re 38 and you can’t jump much anymore. Shaq has also rebounded about 12 percent of Boston’s misses, an elite offensive rebounding rate. That’s a valuable thing for a team that has only one good offensive rebounder (Glen Davis, not doing much offensive rebounding this year, actually) and is uniquely dependent on making the first shot it takes. Boston is never going to be a good offensive rebounding team — it ranks last this season — but an extra possession here or there means a ton to a team that shoots as well as the Celtics.

Meanwhile, on defense, Shaq is trying. He jumped out on Derrick Rose on a bunch of pick-and-rolls last Friday, almost trapping the Chicago point guard on several possessions before trying to get back into the paint and find a big guy to defend. And if you watched the first episode of The Association, a documentary following the Celtics this season and airing on ESPN, you heard Rivers tell Shaq not to bother jumping out on big guys on pick-and-pop plays if the team does not consider them significant shooting threats. Keep that in mind when you see players like New Jersey’s Johan Petro raining mid-range shots on Boston.

But even when he’s engaged, Shaq is a defensive liability on the pick-and-roll. There’s no way around it. Denver’s rally against the Celtics on Thursday resulted in part because Boston’s perimeter defenders had to sink down more than usual to help on Nene as the Denver center rolled to the hoop after setting a screen for Chauncey Billups or Ty Lawson. With Paul Pierce or Ray Allen or Marquis Daniels taking an extra step or two into the lane, Denver’s point guards had only to make a simple swing pass around the perimeter to find open shooters.

Boston’s defense has performed at an elite level with O’Neal on the court, but it’s not because of him. It’s no accident that O’Neal has played about 75 percent of his minutes in lineups that include Garnett, according to Basketball Value. Garnett is mobile enough to do a half-dozen things at once, including sometimes running out on Shaq’s man on pick-and-pops and allowing O’Neal to simply slide along the baseline and take KG’s guy. Lineups in which Davis has replaced Garnett alongside Shaq have been worse than league average on defense, according to Basketball Value. Davis is a good player who tries hard, but he can’t duplicate what Garnett does. No one can, really.

This is not meant to denigrate Shaq — not at all. He has been even more than Boston fans hoped he’d be, and he is outperforming his veteran’s-minimum contract of $1.4 million. But that doesn’t mean he’s an All-Star.