A free-throw-shooting contest likely would have yielded different results.

Last night was Shaq’s big night. The Lakers retired his jersey, and bigshots like Phil Jackson were there to mark the occasion. Lakers fans love Phil Jackson… and they were very, very eager for him to know it. Eager enough to make it weird, actually.

A young Aaron Carter beat Shaquille O’Neal at basketball once. My how times have changed.

Will Ferrell likes to do wacky stuff, and often, that wacky stuff involves a sports element. Last night, it happened to be at the Staples Center and involve Shaq. But where have we seen all this before?

Once upon a time, Kobe Bryant was a second fiddle, and the first chair violinist was one Shaquille O’Neal. Their storybook threepeat ended with bad tastes left in each others’ mouths, and the feud came to a head on Christmas Day eight years ago: the first matchup that pitted Kobe against Shaq. And it was a big deal.

Brilliant. Although Lee doesn’t show up in Chris Webber’s “Similarity Scores” section on Basketball-Reference.com, which measures the statistical similarity between players, they do have a pretty even stat line in year eight of their NBA careers (Lee is in his eighth year right now). The one major difference, though? Points per game. In Webber’s eighth full season — by far his best — he averaged 27.1 points per game, compared to Lee’s 17.4 so far this season. In that 2000-01 campaign, Webber finished 4th in MVP voting, so WCW has a ways to go before his is truly the White Chris Webber. [@cjzero]

So here’s a thing that happened: Orlando Magic center/forward Glen Davis wrote a song called “Big Baby Gon’ Turn It Up”. Ahead is a short, distorted clip of it. There’s not too much we can glean from it, but if we know anything about basketball players who foray into the music industry, it will be questionable. Watch after the jump.

There was a presidential debate Wednesday night and don’t Twitter know it. Athletes from all sides of the aisle came to be a part of it. Click through for the makeshift pundits and be sure to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

At a recent Family Feud taping, the survey topic (of 100 men) was introduced: “Name something Shaquille O’Neal has that’s bigger than yours.” Obviously someone was going to say something about penises, and Steve Harvey would get going from there. Well, they did, he did… and the host’s ensuing rant got us thinking.

Shaq didn’t necessarily earn rave reviews for his work as an NBA analyst this past season (although he certainly made strides later on in the year). But regardless of how you feel about Diesel’s inaugural run on Inside the NBA, I think we can all get behind his impromptu invasion of ESPN’s NBA post-game show. It’s just like the old WCW/WWF war, but with more pocket squares.