Shaq, Phil Jackson used to deflate balls

June 8, 2015

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Tom Brady isn’t the only one who prefers playing with a deflated ball.

ESPN’s Baxter Holmes has a long feature about basketballs and how several players prefer their balls. In the article, Holmes points out that both Shaq and Phil Jackson have admitted to deflating balls.

“Sometimes, in the games during all my championship runs, if a ball was too hard, I let air out,” Shaq said on “The Big Podcast With Shaq.” “I’d have a needle. A friend of mine would have a needle and I would get the game ball. … I needed that extra grip, but I wasn’t doing that for cheating purposes. I just needed the extra grip for my hands so I could palm it, a la Michael Jordan, the way he used to palm it.”

Shaq pleaded ignorance regarding the question of whether or not he was cheating and said he wasn’t.

“Because, first of all, I’m not aware of any letter of the law that says, you can’t let air out of the ball,” O’Neal said. “I’m not aware of that. Second of all, it’s all about my [comfort level]. A lot of times, if the balls have too much air in them, they’re too bouncy. I didn’t want them to be bouncy. I needed that grip.”

Around the same time that the Deflategate story was unfolding, some people dug up quotes from a 1986 Chicago Tribune article where Phil Jackson said his early-’70s Knicks liked a deflated ball.

Phil Jackson, quoted in 1986, saying that championship New York Knicks teams intentionally deflated basketballs: pic.twitter.com/wJqAnC6fRQ

— Todd Radom (@ToddRadom) January 28, 2015

“What we used to do was deflate the ball,” Jackson told The Tribune. “We were a short team with our big guys like Willis [Reed], our center, only about 6-8 and Jerry Lucas also 6-8, [Dave] DeBusschere, 6-6. So what we had to rely on was boxing out and hoping the rebound didn’t go long.

“To help ensure that, we’d try to take some air out of the ball. You see, on the ball it says something like ‘inflate to 7 to 9 pounds.’ We’d all carry pins and take the air out to deaden the ball.

“It also helped our offense because we were a team that liked to pass the ball without dribbling it, so it didn’t matter how much air was in the ball. It also kept other teams from running on us because when they’d dribble the ball, it wouldn’t come up so fast.”

As Jackson’s comments indicate, teams have different preferences depending on their styles. If you like to play fast with higher dribbles and longer rebounds to key a fast break, then you want an inflated ball. If you like to slow it down, then an under-inflated ball is the way to go. The important thing is to recognize that there is a guideline of pressure range the league has in its rules and it’s a matter of whether or not that is followed. Jackson said they did.

joy of tweet is correcting errors. Knicks used under inflated balls. wrong! ball has7-9lbs psi. we wanted 7 psi softer but not illegal.

— Phil Jackson (@PhilJackson11) January 28, 2015