Jerry West heard all the gloomy chatter throughout the summer of 1996. When it came to Shaquille O’Neal, agents and others around the NBA goaded the then-Lakers executive, saying, “You guys aren’t going to get him.”

The 7-foot-1 center was already one of the games best in the middle, having guided the Orlando Magic to the NBA Finals two years earlier. As unstoppable as he was entertaining, O’Neal had averaged at least 23 points and 11 rebounds in each of his first four seasons.

“He was a Hall of Fame player when he was in Orlando,” West said recently.

When O’Neal is inducted to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame on Friday, alongside Allen Iverson and Yao Ming, the entirety of his 19-year career will be celebrated. He spent fruitful years in Miami, winning a title in 2006, and late in his career bounced from the Heat to Phoenix, then Cleveland and Boston.

However, O’Neal’s career will always be defined by the eight seasons in Los Angeles, three resulting in championships. It was an era fraught with drama, but defined by success.

“There’s certain players that belong in certain cities,” West said.

Already juggling rap and film projects with hoops, O’Neal might have outgrown Orlando by the mid-’90s.

When Hollywood called, Mr. West was on the line.

“Before basketball was as global as it is, the Lakers were the team,” former Lakers forward Robert Horry said. “Everybody wanted to be there. And Shaq got there and took them back to the glory days. And that’s how he’s going to be remembered.”

Twenty years after O’Neal first arrived, it’s easy to minimize the nip-and-tuck pursuit that predated three championships, O’Neal’s Most Valuable Player Award, the schism between him and Kobe Bryant and the statue that will be erected at Staples Center later this year.

After the 1996 offseason, during which he traded for Bryant and wooed O’Neal, West was hospitalized and treated for exhaustion.

“You put a lot of stress on yourself to accomplish things that people don’t think you can accomplish,” West said. “In the end, he made a decision that changed the course of this franchise for a number of years.”

UNIQUE TALENT

O’Neal arrived in the NBA the No.1 overall draft pick of the Magic and a year later was paired with guard Penny Hardaway, establishing an exciting foundation in one of the NBA’s newest markets. O’Neal was at his most athletic: running, blocking shots, ripping rims off backboards.

“You can argue that, physically, those were his best years,” Lakers assistant coach Brian Shaw said, “because nobody could get up and down the floor at that size and do the things that he could as a young player.”

One familiar rival didn’t think O’Neal understood his own strength early in his career.

“I think back then he didn’t know how dominant he was,” former Lakers and Kings center Vlade Divac said. “On the Lakers, he knew who he is and for example if they needed a score he would ask for the ball or just make it. In Orlando, I don’t think he realized how good he was.”

Shaw played with O’Neal and the Magic from 1994-96, including the 1995 NBA Finals when the Magic were swept by Houston, and again from 2000-04 in L.A.

The Finals loss loomed large for O’Neal.

“He never wanted to feel that again,” Shaw said.

O’Neal averaged 23.7 points and 10.9 points over 1,207 career games – 514 with the Lakers. Those numbers ballooned in the title seasons of 2000-02. He averaged 29.9 points and 14.5 rebounds during the playoffs those seasons, earning three Finals MVP awards.

O’Neal had learned how to harness his athleticism, to maximize his mountainous size and use the liberal rules of post play to his strength.

“We’ve seen tall people,” West said, “but we’ve never seen someone with his body frame who was capable of doing things that he did. He was unique. We haven’t seen a player like him. Will we? Who knows.”

O’Neal was never easy to defend, but Horry – who first played against O’Neal in college – at least had a strategy. Rather than go mano-a-mano with the bruising center, he would play off him and try to match his length and block shots.

Then O’Neal got to the NBA and began to understand the powerful weapon that was his hulking frame.

“He got to the point where he knew how to use that body and it was like, ‘Oh, I can’t do that,’ because he just got too big and too strong and too physical,” Horry said. “He learned how to move that big body, he was agile.”

“I’ve never seen anyone that big move the way he did,” said Lakers coach Luke Walton, who was a rookie in 2004, O’Neal’s final season in Los Angeles.

More than once, Walton found himself guarding O’Neal during scrimmages. With Walton at 6-foot-8, 230 pounds – “Which is a pretty good-sized person,” Walton said – O’Neal enjoyed a considerable advantage. O’Neal would instruct the other Lakers not to give Walton any help in the post.

“It was literally like being a child,” Walton said. “There was nothing I could do but try to foul him, and even trying to foul him most of the time he would still score. And then he’d eventually tell me and other players that if we fouled him, not only could we not get help, but if we fouled him he was going to punch us.”

And if anyone knew about getting fouled, it was O’Neal, whose career 52.7 percent free-throw shooting made him the founding father of intentional fouling. Opponents to this day, however, lament how often the strategy would backfire.

“He started the whole Hack-A-Shaq, but some crucial times he would make those,” Divac said.

The prevalence of hacking lousy free-throw shooters in the modern game harkens back to O’Neal, although former Portland Trail Blazers general manager Bob Whitsitt said it was different when teams, including his, went after O’Neal.

“When you do Hack-A-Shaq on (Clippers center) DeAndre Jordan, big deal,” Whitsitt said. “He’s a nice player, but he’s not the MVP of the league.

“You do something to upstage the MVP of the league, you’ll be shocked. You think they don’t have another gear but they tend to always have one more gear in that bag that you didn’t know about.”

Whitsitt saw it firsthand when the Lakers rallied from a 13-point fourth-quarter deficit to beat the Blazers in Game 7 of the 2000 Western Conference finals, sending O’Neal back to the NBA Finals for the first time since 1991 and on his way to only the fifth “three-peat” in NBA history.

UNSELFISH PRANKSTER

O’Neal’s buoyant personality is as much a part of his legacy as what he did on the court. He was always the prankster. Sending rookies like Walton into blizzards to buy him headphones, dunking them in the ice bath, insisting they ditch their shirts and make snow angels on the tarmac.

“He picked on us for sure,” Walton said, “but he let us know that if anyone messed with us he had our back on the court, so he was a lot of fun to play with.”

When he went through the training program at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Reserve Academy, he used his teammates as stand-ins for perps, practicing arrests, reciting the penal code.

Refusing to participate in O’Neal’s antics typically resulted in an ultimatum. Shaw said O’Neal would twirl towels around his fists, fashioning makeshift boxing gloves, and give teammates a choice: “Either do what I asked you to do, or you deal with these fists.”

The hazing, however, had a payoff.

“Once you did it and did all that stuff for him,” Shaw said, “he would do anything and everything for you.”

Lakers players, coaches and trainers were all rewarded with Rolex watches when O’Neal received an $88 million contract extension in 2000.

“So it went both ways,” Shaw said. “He was very, very generous.”

Horry called O’Neal “a real teammate.”

“Nobody talks about how unselfish he was,” Horry said, “because the rift between him and Kobe comes down to whose team is it and that kind of crap, but he was all about winning. … Just everybody that’s played with him adored him.”

With one very notable exception.

FEUDING DUO

Issues between O’Neal and Bryant percolated under the veneer of success, which confounded Horry. A pair of superstars is key to a run of championships but, with the wrong personalities, can ultimately be toxic, as the Lakers learned.

The bickering between O’Neal and Bryant was constant, and shots were lobbed through the press. But the on-court result was so productive.

“When you win a championship,” he said, “you always hug the person that you’re closest with on the team and those two were always the first to hug. So I always looked at it like that and was like, ‘And y’all beefing?’”

When Bryant first arrived, he was a brash teenager. O’Neal was an established superstar.

“It was clear who our best player was at that time,” West said. “It was Shaquille O’Neal. Until Kobe started to play the game at a level few have played, there was clearly a pecking order.”

West left in 2000 to run the Memphis Grizzliies’ front office and said, “I didn’t see the rest of the spiral downward.”

After the loaded 2003-04 Lakers failed to win a title, despite the arrival of aging Hall of Famers Karl Malone and Gary Payton, the time came for the Lakers to choose between O’Neal and Bryant.

“The owner wanted him gone so he was gone,” said West, who several years earlier had departed to run the Memphis Grizzlies front office.

On July 14, 2004, the Lakers traded O’Neal to Miami for Lamar Odom, Caron Butler, Brian Grant and a draft pick, bringing an end to O’Neal’s time in Los Angeles and the culmination of the dynasty built by West.

With the Heat, O’Neal’s numbers steadily declined. Even though he averaged 20 points and 9.2 rebounds in 2005-06, he had clearly slid into the role of Robin to Dwyane Wade’s Batman – a flip-flop in job descriptions that Bryant had so strongly desired.

In Miami, “he kind of just wasn’t the Shaq that I watched for so many years and played with for so many years,” Horry said.

He wondered what damage the trade did to O’Neal’s psyche.

“If you look at him, as soon as he left the Lakers he gained more weight, he wasn’t that dominant force, he wasn’t as agile as he used to be,” Horry said. “There were a lot of things that were going on that wasn’t Shaq-like.”

None of that undid what O’Neal accomplished throughout his career and, especially, with the Lakers.

Twenty years after luring O’Neal to L.A., West will be in Springfield this weekend for the Hall of Fame ceremony.

“I don’t know anyone I had more fun with than him,” West said. “And to this day, he and I have, I think, a great friendship today.”

That’s the thing he didn’t necessarily know he was getting back in 1996.

The basketball player? That was – what else? – a slam dunk.

“He wasn’t going to be anything but a Hall of Fame player, or one of the greatest players to ever play the game,” West said. “Period.”

Contact the writer: boram@scng.com