Every NBA team’s greatest enforcer of all time
By Luke Anton
Los Angeles Lakers — Shaquille O’Neal
At 7-foot-1 and 325 pounds, Shaq was born to be an enforcer in the NBA if only due to his sheer size and gargantuan strength. He sure had the charisma for it, too. Shaq knew he was bigger and better than everybody else. He wanted to show you, tell you about it, and make sure you never forgot. But it was already impossible to forget because there was nobody else like him. And not many had more nicknames, some of which invoke his enforcer persona more than others: Superman, The Big Aristotle, Shaq Diesel, The Big Shaqtus and Shaq Daddy to name a few.
Shaq was such a behemoth that it almost didn’t seem fair. In his younger days, he was a bulldozer with the agility of a lion. As he got older, he was slower but even more of a mighty mammoth. The Lakers got him at his peak. There was no greater force in the paint, arguably ever.
Shaq’s defining moment as an enforcer was when he dunked on top of poor Chris Dudley and then proceeded to two-hand shove Dudley down to the ground. Just dunking on him wasn’t enough. Shaq needed another exclamation point, an even more expressive way of declaring: “There is absolutely nothing you can do to stop me!!” (Except foul him in crunch-time. Hack-a-Shaq was known to be effective.)
[Shoutout to Kermit Washington here who was an enforcer for Kareem’s Lakers back in the 70s. Washington is the one who infamously punched Rudy Tomjanovich with such a vigorous haymaker that Tomjanovich’s face was fractured and he almost died. If you almost kill a guy during a game, you at least have to get a shoutout on a Greatest Enforcer’s List.]’