By Leaps and Bounds, He’s a Long Way Off Peak Form

If only it were as simple as a Beatles song.

“All you need is Shaq, da-da-da-da-da,” a group of net-wearing Laker fans sang.

“All you need is Shaq, da-da-da-da-da. All you need is Shaq, Shaq

Finally, 12 games and 24 days after the NBA season started, the Lakers had Shaquille O’Neal. Peace, harmony and maybe even a few victories were sure to follow, right? Even if he didn’t start, even if his playing time was restricted, the mere sight of O’Neal in that gold No. 34 jersey would restore the championship swagger to the Lakers and strike fear in those nobody Chicago Bulls. Since Hubie Brown’s no longer available, isn’t that how Paul McCartney would break it down?

“You could just see more confidence in some of the guys, knowing that they were going to have the big fella back in the middle,” Laker guard Brian Shaw said. “It wasn’t a pretty game to watch, but you still felt like we were going to win ... for the first time in a long time.”

Yes, O’Neal has to work his way back into playing condition and his teammates -- especially the new ones -- have to learn his “proclivities out there on the floor,” as Phil Jackson put it.

The question is, how good will they be once all of that happens? On Friday, on a night when O’Neal was effective but not yet dominant and Kobe Bryant settled into a third-quarter comfort zone, they weren’t good enough to put away a bad Bull team until late in the fourth quarter.

For a team whose only “W” in the previous eight games was an overtime victory against the Golden State Warriors, that 86-73 win might feel like an excuse to pop some Cristal. But for a group that’s responsible for hanging the three most recent gold banners in Staples Center, it wasn’t very impressive.

The Bulls were sorry even by their own 4-9 standards. Top scorer Jalen Rose shot two for 16 and finished 17 points below his 23-point average. The team shot 35 percent.

O’Neal checked in to a standing ovation with 5:43 remaining in the first quarter. He had 17 points on eight-for-13 shooting and grabbed seven rebounds in 21 minutes.

“We got exactly what we hoped to get out of him tonight,” Jackson said. “Some points, some minutes and a win.”

Still, this wasn’t the old rim-wrecking, posterizing Shaq. It looked a lot more like the 2001-02 version, the guy whose game was closer to rim level than above it. His speed and footwork looked OK. But otherwise he resembled the prairie states: no elevation.

You could notice the difference on the banner end of the court. It was on that same basket that O’Neal made his most memorable play at Staples Center, the slam off a Kobe Bryant lob that sealed the Lakers’ Game 7 comeback against the Portland Trail Blazers in 2000. His hand was up near the top of the white box on that play. When Rick Fox threw an alley-oop to O’Neal in the fourth quarter Friday, he only barely reached above the rim to dunk it.

He used to soar above even the biggest obstacles on the court. One of my favorite pictures used to hang in the hallway of the Washington Post. It was O’Neal, in his Orlando Magic uniform, dunking over 7-foot-7 Gheorghe Muresan. He cleared Muresan’s outstretched hands by at least 15 inches.

Friday night, the 6-9 Donyell Marshall blocked two of O’Neal’s shots. One was a straight-up block of Shaq’s baseline jumper, something I’ve never seen before.

So he’ll have to rely more on power and pivot moves, while facing an increased amount of double-teams and zones. His teammates didn’t do anything to establish themselves as threats while O’Neal was gone, so opponents will be happy to sit back and say “fire away, fellas” while they surround Shaq like the bartender at a hot nightclub.

The players did get their promised open looks, and they usually couldn’t capitalize. Much of their scoring was hard-earned -- from an aggressive Derek Fisher (16 points), then an opportunistic Bryant (16 of his 21 points in the third) and an over-exuberant Slava Medvedenko (12 points on 17 shots -- in 17 minutes).

All things considered, this will be O’Neal’s most challenging season since Hakeem Olajuwon’s skills started to fade.

O’Neal wouldn’t agree, but all of a sudden there are some legitimate centers popping up in the Western Conference. Shawn Bradley has gone from stick figure to low-post presence. Yao Ming is looking more like a No. 1 pick every game.

The most important part of O’Neal’s night wasn’t his time on the court but how his achy foot felt afterward.

“It feels pretty good,” he said. “The true test will be in the morning.”

And in the weeks ahead.

*

J.A. Adande can be reached at: j.a.adande@latimes.com