Kobe Bryant recently claimed he could have won 12 NBA titles if Shaquille O’Neal had a better work ethic. Little did Bryant know how hard the Hall of Fame center worked to keep the ball out of his hands.

In response to Bryant bringing up his old gripe about the big man being out of shape — while the duo famously feuded and won three championships together with the Lakers at the start of the century — O’Neal said the shoot-happy guard would have had 12 if he’d passed more. And apparently, O’Neal devised a scheme to try and end the ball-hogging.

According to former guard Raja Bell, who played alongside O’Neal in Phoenix, the big man had a secret signal he would flash to teammates (twitching his thumb downwards), telling them to stop passing the ball to Bryant.

“Shaq told me a story. We had a kid named Gordon Giricek on our Suns team … and Gordon would go in the game, and Gordon was about his buckets … No matter what we were doing, no matter what the flow or the chemistry was, Gordon would be just, you know, shooting the ball,” Bell said on the “Kanell and Bell” podcast this week. “But Shaq started saying, ‘Hey, guys, this is the symbol. When I give you this, Gordon doesn’t get the ball anymore.’

“And I’m like, ‘Dude, what is the background on that? Where’d you come up with that?’ And he was like, ‘When Kobe was young, he would be going in and just trying to get ’em, so the rest of us had a universal kind of code that if we looked at each other and went [gives signal] then that meant Kobe didn’t get the ball anymore.”

After eight seasons together (1996-2004), O’Neal would be the first to win a championship without his former running mate (Miami, 2006). Bryant would then capture back-to-back Finals MVPs while leading the Lakers to titles in 2009 and 2010.

“I just got one more than Shaq,” Bryant said after winning his fifth championship. “You can take that to the bank. … You guys know how I am. I don’t forget anything.”