The controversy surrounding Deflategate this offseason has caused a lot of sports fans to actually care about the inflation (or deflation) of footballs.

Well as it turns out, NFL players aren’t the only ones who are particular about the weight of game balls.

In a new feature published by ESPN’s Baxter Holmes, some of the NBA’s top players, young and old, admitted they have superstitious rituals with every basketball and have even deflated basketballs at times.

Before home games, the Oklahoma City Thunder’s top security representative will personally deliver the game ball to star point guard Russell Westbrook in the locker room. Westbrook then takes it, inspects it, rubs it, dribbles it, holds it, smells it and, after approving it, passes it to each of his teammates, a sacred ceremony before the players circle up and sprint out of the tunnel.

But what’s really striking is how many former players, including Shaq and Phil Jackson, admit to have deflated basketballs during their playing days.

“Sometimes, in the games during all my championship runs, if a ball was too hard, I let air out,” the former All-Star center said in a recent episode of “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. “What we used to do was deflate the ball,” told the Chicago Tribune in a story published in 1986. “We were a short team with our big guys like Willis , our center, only about 6-8 and Jerry Lucas also 6-8, 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.

As Jackson tweeted recently, he admitted 29 years ago to deflating basketballs in the 1970s

Head over to ESPN to read the whole story.