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Shaquille O’Neal is either simply huge or has a terrible case of the jimmy legs.

Shaq-House-BedThis is Shaq’s bed shown in an episode of MTV’s Cribs. There are no funny camera angles or editing here, it’s enormous. The former star NBA player–himself seven feet tall and 300 pounds–apparently requires a sprawl space of 450 square feet.

Shaq’s bed is a 15’x30′ monstrosity which would, for the sake of comparison, take up 20% of the total floor space of the average single family home in 2010.

Shaq was generous enough to bring us into his home to view this small landing pad, but what about other NBA players? Many of them are as tall as Shaq or taller, so would they have similar nighttime needs?

NBA All-Star Bed

The average square footage of an American bed ranges from a Single bed’s 20.3 square feet (11x the surface area of an NBA basketball) to a California King’s bed’s 42 square feet. This is obviously nowhere near Shaq’s bed, which is ten times larger than the California King. The average American is not ten times shorter than Shaq, so it seems as though Shaq just needs the space. In a house with its own basketball court, why not include a bed that is 1/5th the size of a tennis court?

Only 20 players in NBA history have been listed at over 7’3″ tall. They are all taller than Shaq, and probably don’t share his taste in comically sized (and themed) beds. But what if, through some weird time warp tour, all these players had to share a bed in some very oddly designed hotel? To accommodate them all, I’ll give them each a Shaq-sized area of bed.

A bed to fit all these players would be 9,000 square feet in area. It would cover three doubles tennis courts and be 1/5 of an acre. If we kicked out the NBA players and let average Americans sleep there (if they preferred Single beds), it would fit 450 people. In fact, given that a regulation-sized NBA court is 4,700 square feet, our monster bed could host an NBA game with enough room left over for 215 spectators.

After the game, everyone could just lie down and nap.