Pat Riley looked back on Shaquille O’Neal’s arrival in Miami and the commitment that defined his first season with the Miami Heat.
“When Shaq came, he wanted to come here,” Riley said. “And I’ll never forget that the first thing I did was weigh him,” he added with a laugh. “He was fine. He was open to everything. And I knew Shaq had one more in him.”
At the time, O’Neal weighed 383 pounds (about 174 kg) with roughly 14% body fat or more. Riley stressed that Shaq was never grossly out of shape — he was simply built differently.
“Shaq is a big man. He’s a 380-pound guy,” Riley explained. “But by the end of the year, he was down to 323 pounds (about 147 kg) and 12% body fat. That’s 60 pounds lost — around 27 kilograms.”
According to Riley, that transformation was the result of a real commitment rather than a need to fix bad habits.
“He could still play big, but he played great,” Riley said. “He actually played better that first year.”
O’Neal’s impact helped Miami reach the Eastern Conference Finals, where the Heat were eliminated in a hard-fought seven-game series against the Detroit Pistons during Shaq’s first season in South Florida.
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