Columnist Dean Juipe: Shaq should put blame on himself, not Kupchak

Dean Juipe

Tuesday, June 22, 2004 | 9:01 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4084.

At 32 years old, Shaquille O'Neal has played basketball for a long time and is one of the most dominant figures in the history of the sport.

Yet he seems to have overlooked one of the game's most basic, core elements.

He has apparently failed to realize that it is a team's star player who is responsible for setting the standards of that club, and it is that same player who -- for better or worse -- leaves his mark on the organization not only through his own play but by his ability or inability to impose his will on his teammates.

It's irrefutable: Every team from kindergarten to the NBA has its personality molded and formed by its most accomplished player.

Sometimes this leads to a selfish team or a passive one. And sometimes it leads to a cohesive team or an aggressive one.

It may not be a duty the star player desires or chooses to relish, yet it's one he cannot escape. His outlook, his actions, his chiding and direction will determine his team's overall character.

So when O'Neal blames Los Angeles general manager Mitch Kupchak for the Lakers' collapse and eventual embarrassments in the NBA Finals, he is mistakenly shifting the burden from himself to a man in a suit who sits in a suite. He conveniently accuses another of a lapse for which he is primarily responsible.

Kupchak's role is to acquire the best players possible, not to scold or humor them into a workable unit. In this case he may be guilty of overestimating the value of a few of those players, but he is not the architect of their demise.

The Lakers looked great on paper and that's all Kupchak was obliged to provide.

O'Neal says he wants to be traded because the Lakers are no longer a "team" in the most aesthetically pleasing sense of the word. He decries the individualism that is rampant among the Lakers and names Kupchak, rather than himself, as the culprit.

The big guy needs to brush up on his basketball primers. He needs to be reminded that it was his grousing and his refusal to demand the ball and take over a game that, arguably as much as anything from Los Angeles' perspective, led to the Lakers losing to the Detroit Pistons.

"No one cares," O'Neal said Friday in attempting to explain his criticism of Kupchak (and Lakers owner Jerry Buss). "When I was brought here by (then GM) Jerry West (in 1996), there was a team concept. Now the organization is different.

"It seems right now they're trying to pit one person against another."

O'Neal didn't expound on that latter remark, but it presumably has something to do with his relationship with his teammates -- and especially Kobe Bryant -- and perhaps his dealings with his already departed head coach, Phil Jackson. Yet common sense dictates the unlikeliness of Kupchak or Buss attempting to manipulate the Lakers into anything other than a harmonious group of wealthy athletes who were assembled at great cost to win the NBA title.

O'Neal -- who has two years at a total of $58.3 million remaining on his contract -- failed the Lakers as much as the Lakers failed him. As the Pistons were gaining control of the series he pouted, he whined about not getting the ball and he contributed in no small part to the Lakers becoming unhappy and factional.

In short, he allowed the team to mirror his own outlook, which was sour and depressed, at a time when he could have insisted on serenity and a renewed sense of commitment for the task at hand.

As a result the Lakers collapsed into an ugly, disinterested shell of their former selves. They became petty and disenchanted and it was the result of O'Neal himself being petty and disenchanted.

A star player has that kind of impact on a team and O'Neal is remiss in not acknowledging it, and he is doubly at fault for blaming Kupchak.

The buck stops with a team's best player. It always has and always will.

He is the person who is most responsible not so much for whether a team wins or loses, but how it plays the game.