Lakers News: How Jerry West Landed Shaquille O'Neal In Free Agency

Your Los Angeles Lakers' most recent dynastic era (the LeBron James-Anthony Davis iteration needs to win at least one more title before we even start that conversation) was sparked by one eventful summer in 1996.

Then-Orlando Magic superstar center Shaquille O'Neal, insulted when the club that drafted him first out of LSU in 1992 offered him a "mere" four years and $54 million (as Joel Corry of CBS Sports recalls), and began fielding other offers.

To keep that lowballed sum in perspective, two inferior star centers drafted below O'Neal in '92, Alonzo Mourning and Juwan Howard, each signed seven-season, $105 million contracts with the Miami Heat and the then-Washington Bullets.

Los Angeles Hall of Fame guard-turned-team president Jerry West swung in from the top rope with a "Godfather offer:" a seven-season, $120 million million deal. That, plus a trade for the draft rights to a very confident 17-year-old high schooler out of Philadelphia, helped lure the Big Diesel to the team where he would ultimately burnish his Hall of Fame legacy.

In a new interview, O'Neal told Brandon "Scoop B" Robinson of Bovada Sports that, beyond the money, West's "elevator pitch," as they say in Hollywood, was fairly streamlined, and leaned on an essential component of his future Lakers tenure.

“When I was leaving Orlando, he brought me here and told me the truth," O'Neal said. "I would have a young team and a guy named Kobe. That guy’s going to be good but in a couple of years you’re going to have championships. It wasn’t no ‘get you this or get you that.’ Jerry’s not that type of guy.”

The 7'1" big man inked the contract on July 17th, 1996, a momentous moment in Lakers lore.

O'Neal and Bryant would of course go on to win three straight NBA titles together, from 2000-02, and would appear in one other NBA Finals in 2004 (let's not rehash what happened in that one). Their tenure as a terrifying tandem was cut short after eight seasons, when it became apparently they loathed each other too much to continue. Then-GM Mitch Kupchak flipped O'Neal to the Miami Heat, where he would go on to win his fourth championship in 2004.

A revamped Lakers squad with Bryant, not O'Neal, at the helm, and Hall of Fame power forward/center Pau Gasol flanking him, would eventually appear in three consecutive NBA Finals once again, from 2008-10, winning in '09 and '10.

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