When Shaquille O’Neal asked the Los Angeles Lakers to be traded, one of the teams he targeted was Dallas. Although there are rumors floating around that Dirk Nowitzki was involved in those trade talks, Mark Cuban said things never got that involved.
‘It was something we certainly tried to do. We had a lot of players and draft picks [to offer], and we tried to sell [the Lakers] on the perspective that yeah, maybe you have a down year, but then in a couple of years out, you have cap room. They weren’t buying it, and the response was, `There’s nothing on your roster that we want.’ . . . It was about a two-minute conversation.”
I find it hard to believe that the Lakers would have turned down a trade involving Nowitzki, but I doubt he was ever on the table. Shaq is a great center, but in his stint in Miami he has been far from dominant. It would have been unwise for the Mavericks to part ways with their franchise player just to get a few of O’Neal’s twilight years.
