Popovich Takes Credit for Shaq's Improved Free Throw Shooting

A report from the US Airways Center in Phoenix, where the Spurs faced the Suns on January 29th.

PHOENIX, Ariz. -- Shaquille O'Neal is having a resurgence this season. His scoring and rebounding averages are the highest they've been since his '05-'06 championship season with the Heat, and his play has earned him a trip back to the All-Star game, an honor he didn't receive a season ago.

Perhaps the most surprising of all of Shaq's improvements has come at the free throw line, where he's shooting a repectable .628 this season -- 10 points higher than his career average. So before the game against San Antonio, when Spurs' coach Gregg Popovich was asked if he would employ the hack-a-Shaq given O'Neal's improvement at the foul line, he gave a rather interesting answer.

"Well, I would like to take full credit for Shaq's improvement," Popovich said with a smile. "Because I think that I've helped him to focus. And it's a job, as a coach, to help a player focus. You just usually try to make people focus who are in the same color uniform as the players you're coaching. So I got that part of it wrong ... the better somebody shoots free throws, the less one would think about fouling them."

The jokes just keep on coming where the ol' hack-a-Shaq is concerned, I guess.

On opening night, as you may recall, Popovich broke the ice by instructing one of his players to intentionally foul Shaq away from the ball five seconds into the game, and hilariously gave the two thumbs up sign to let everybody know he was kidding around. But it wasn't always like this.

The strategy was serious business during last season's playoffs, and irritated the Big Cactus to the point where he called it a "coward move" by Popovich. It's now water under the bridge apparently, and in an ironic twist, the Suns attempted the strategy against the Spurs' Bruce Bowen on Thursday. The result? It backfired. Bowen had hit just two of his eight attempts all season, but made five out of six when he was fouled intentionally.

With San Antonio continuing their dominance over the Suns, and with the hack-a-whoever strategy failing when it was tried against the Spurs, it's likely something that Popovich will continue to crack jokes about whenever the mood strikes.