Shaq was famously left off the original Dream Team. Shaq was a junior at LSU at the time and fully eligible, but the spot instead went with Christian Laettner, a Duke standout who was thought of as more polished. "I was pissed off," Shaq recalled 20 years later. "I was jealous. But then I had to come to the realization that I was a more explosive, more powerful player, but Christian Laettner was a little bit more fundamentally sound than I was." Luckily, the snub only motivated him.