Shaq still miffed over Nash topping him for MVPs

There's a school of thought among some that the NBA MVP award is redundant and the real most valuable players year in and year out are the dominant players of their respective eras: LeBron James now, and Michael Jordan in the '90s, for instance.

Shaquille O'Neal could count as one of those players, the early 2000s being the wheelhouse of his Hall of Fame career. As such, the fact that Shaq only has one Maurice Podoloff Trophy to his name is something of a travesty, given his run of dominance over the league from about 1998 to 2006.

Watch: Lakers unveil statue of Shaq outside Staples Center

O'Neal's trade from the Los Angeles Lakers to the Miami Heat in 2004 put Miami over the hump, and he's still bitter that Phoenix Suns supernova Steve Nash won back-to-back MVP awards in 2005 and 2006 instead of himself.

"LeBron and myself are similar," O'Neal told SI's Ben Golliver. "We could be MVP every year. (I should have won) three, easily. Kobe should have won three, too. (I should have won) the two that Steve Nash got over me. It pisses me off. (Nash) knows."

Even the MVP award Shaq did win - in 2000 with the Lakers - comes with a bone of contention for the big man. That year, one voter - then-CNN anchor Fred Hickman - cast his ballot for Allen Iverson, costing O'Neal a shot at becoming the first unanimous MVP in NBA history (something Stephen Curry finally accomplished last season).

"The one where that crazy dummy Fred Hickman fucked up my historical (unanimous MVP) so now Curry gets the first unanimous," O'Neal said. "That bothers me a lot."

Shaq won't go down as the best player in NBA history, but the case can be made quite easily that he was the most unstoppable player to ever play the game. With no equal in terms of size and athleticism, opponents had little recourse but to try to hack the bejesus out of him and put the notoriously poor foul shooter at the line.