NBA Insider with Ken Berger

This entry was updated at 11:53 p.m. after an interview with Miami Heat coach Pat Riley.

Any time Shaquille O’Neal shows up in the locker room, he’s always worth a listen. Tonight, he stopped by the visiting room at Continental Airlines Arena before the Heat played the Nets and weighed in on the Kobe Bryant situation.

Lakers coach Phil Jackson got fined $50,000 for defending Bryant and saying the league was on a “witch hunt” against him. Bryant has received two one-game suspensions for striking players in the face this season, serving one of them in the Lakers’ only trip to Madison Square Garden to face the Knicks. This week, Bryant was retroactively assessed a flagrant foul for elbowing Philadelphia’s Kyle Korver – a play that wasn’t even called a foul in the game.

O’Neal, whose feud with Kobe when they were teammates in Los Angeles has been well documented, was asked if Bryant has an image problem.

“Image is reality, not what others create for you,” Shaq said. “You are what you are.”

Then Shaq broke into some Eminem lyrics, saying, “And I am whatever you say I am. And if I wasn’t, then why would I say I am?”

Heat coach Pat Riley has a $50,000 fine on his resume from 2004, although he remembered it being more.

“Did I?” Riley said. “Fifty or seventy-five. I think I got mine back. I called David [Stern] and said the money goes to charity, so he sent it to a charity of mine. I don’t know, to be honest with you, what’s going on with Kobe. He’s just protecting his player.

“Plus, you know, [Jackson] makes $10 million, so...”

Another interesting exchange occurred when O’Neal was asked about Courtney Paris, the center on the Oklahoma women’s team who has said she wants to emulate him.

“Hopefully she’ll be allowed to do it, because they’re trying to ban what I used to do and what I do,” O’Neal said. “So I wish her well.”

And really, no one can emulate Shaq.

“I’m unemulatable,” Shaq said. “I took the files and deleted them, ate them, used them in the bathroom, flushed it, it went to a sewage plant and blew a sewage plant up. So there’s no way my style can be copied. It’s gone, forever.”

Here’s where you can go for a link to more Kobe stuff, some observations from basket-blogger extraordinaire Henry Abbott on the epic Suns-Mavericks game last night, and some highlight clips that seem to prove Magic Johnson couldn’t go to his left.

See you tomorrow night from the Garden, where we will find out if the Knicks beating the Hornets will be enough for Isiah Thomas to get another contract extension.