Advisor to Shaquille O’Neal’s agent describes botched free agent negotiations

The Orlando Magic lost one of the biggest free agent prizes in NBA history. The negotiations with Shaquille O’Neal were a disaster for the Orlando Magic.

It has been 20 years since Orlando Magic history changed forever.

July 18, 1996, was the day Shaquille O’Neal officially signed a contract with the Los Angeles Lakers, ending perhaps the zenith of the Magic’s popularity and its biggest championship window.

The Magic were young and naive. Orlando was young and naive. And the star that would make or break their franchise was on the market. They were not quite sure what to do.

This Magic Moment, the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary, brought with it the revelation Shaquille O’Neal always wanted to stay in Orlando. It was something he said during his induction into the Orlando Magic Hall of Fame.

There was always the feeling O’Neal’s agent, Leonard Armato, was always pushing him to L.A. But that appears not to be true as the story gets told more and more.

What This Magic Moment also made clear was the Magic massively mishandled the negotiations. In a number of ways.

And that was again confirmed in an article commemorating the 20th anniversary of one of the biggest free agency moves by Joel Corry for CBS Sports. Corry was an adviser for Armato during the negotiations.

"Initially, almost all of our internal discussions focused on Shaq staying with Orlando. As mentioned, they simply had more to offer Shaq than anyone else, not just for their ability to offer him the keys to a budding dynasty with a potential Hall-of-Fame wingman in Penny Hardaway, but more specifically, and perhaps more importantly, the fact that they could offer him the most money.[. . .]But they didn’t do that. Instead, they lowballed him. Almost offensively so.There are some aspects of Shaq’s free agency that I remember like they happened yesterday, and that initial offer is one of them — $54 million over four years with none of the yearly salaries specified, a far cry from the seven-year, $105 million deals Alonzo Mourning and Juwan Howard, both appreciably inferior players, had just received from the Miami Heat and Washington Bullets, respectively."

This Magic Moment does get into some of these negotiations. The Magic certainly gave him a low offer at $54 million over three years and were completely floored when the Miami Heat made the $100-million offer to Alonzo Mourning. That helped plant a seed of doubt for O’Neal.

The negotiations were even further bungled when the Magic noted they were trying to preserve cap space to re-sign Anfernee Hardaway. And made even worse when they reportedly told O’Neal he needed to improve his defense and rebounding — never mind that all his metrics at the time were fine in both categories . . . and he was Shaquille O’Neal.

The Orlando Sentinel poll gets a lot of the flack for O’Neal’s departure, but that was really the last straw. Rising salaries were a big part of it, and the Magic were slow to realize what was happening. In addition to the gaffes in negotiating the deal with O’Neal.

Losing O’Neal was also a confluence of several unique circumstances in NBA history.

There was no restricted free agency at the time — the only time in NBA history there was no restricted free agency to bail the Magic out. And Orlando seemed to be playing hard ball with their superstar player, especially since they had his Bird Rights to show how much they appreciated him.

It just so happened too that the Los Angeles Lakers were one of the few teams willing to take the risk and free up the cap space to go steal O’Neal. Especially when it became clear the Magic were bungling the negotiations and O’Neal was beginning to look around.

Orlando as a franchise certainly seemed a bit naive in the team’s approach. That much was made clear in This Magic Moment  too. The Magic appeared to be playing games with O’Neal and left the door open for someone to swoop in.

There is the famous line John Gabriel said about the negotiations that owner Rich DeVos wanted O’Neal to want to stay in Orlando. Whatever that means.

O’Neal still got cast as the villain though for leaving Orlando. Perhaps that is the lot of a superstar athlete. The sociology of sports fandom is to protect the owners who stay forever and the players who seem migratory and are playing a game for millions of dollars.

The Magic got caught playing catch up the entire free agency with O’Neal. They got caught following the Heat and their mega offer. They got caught trying to play catch up to the Lakers at the end.

And now they are still trying to catch what they had those fledgling years, as an organization. The scars of that decision still haunt the Magic as an organization — look no further than the next superstar center they lost to the Lakers more than a dozen years later.

The Magic as a franchise learned a valuable lesson. But one that was very costly in the end.

O’Neal went on to become one of the best players in NBA history and a four-time NBA champion. The Magic certainly missed out on something very special. Whether they actually could have held on to O’Neal that summer 20 years ago is still a matter for some debate.

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History though certainly does not make the Magic look good, any way the story is told.