I’m not trying to read more into it than it is – the Suns only won one game this past Sunday. An important one for sure, as they faced the defending champion San Antonio Spurs, but it still was just one of their 82 regular season games. Yet it seemed to be so much more. For the first time since bringing along Shaq, the Suns’ game style seemed to be fluent, glitch free with no alien element involved.

With Shaquille O'Neal around, Phoenix has seen a slide in their performance. Everybody knew getting the big Aristotle would mean sacrificing a number of games for the cohesion to appear in their game. Yet the NBA is not a league of patience, so whilst on paper everyone knew that the Suns needed time, the futile attempts for the team to gel have made the crowd and so-called experts restless.

This is why the 94-87 win against Los Spurs was a much needed one, and it’s not just the fact that the Suns won the game, it’s the way they won it. They went to Shaq early and often. He created all sorts of mis-match problems for the Spurs. Kurt Thomas was supposed to be acquired from the Seattle Supersonics for just this match-up, yet he was mostly unable to stop Shaq.

Thomas did have his moments though. He managed to cause headaches with his smooth mid-range jumpshot which forced the Suns center away from the rim many times. Plus, when the action got physical Kurt more than held his own against the taller, bigger O’Neal. At the end of the day however, he (or any other Spurs team-mate) was unable to stop the big guy when it counted most.

More importantly, Shaq got some huge stops against the opposition’s superstar, Tim Duncan, in the final minutes. Duncan was unable to drive by him, and had to force up contested shot after contested shot as O’Neal showed his best defensive game of the season. His most memorable play on defense might have been a highly uncharacteristic one. He rolled perfectly from one side of the rim to the other to take a charge from Manu Ginobili, who could not believe what had happened. In the end, Shaq had 14 points and 16 rebounds with two blocks, an effort the Suns would gladly accept each and every night.

Of course, the Suns’ win had as much to do with Steve Nash scoring 19 and dishing 14 assists, and with Grant Hill hitting a bunch of big shots on his way to 18 points. Yet this is exactly the point. Shaq needs not to be uber-dominant like he was 6-7 years ago. He needs to be integrated into a system of play that the Suns can feel comfortable in. We just saw an example of this. You had no questions on whether he fits in on this night, he was simply one of the guys who had a big part in why they won.