He would have been helpful in slowing down Sheed, but man if you're pinning your title hopes on a 40 year old Mailman that's not really a place you wanna be. It's not the craziest thing in the world that a 40 year old got hurt after playing a 100 game season.

Honestly that team was such a fucking shitshow, they're lucky they even made the Finals that year. They were literally fighting each other in the bathroom during the Finals. It was the absolute height of the Kobe-Shaq beef when they were making everyone choose, and of course most people were choosing Shaq because Kobe was a raging prick back then. So he got mad and threw up a bunch of bad shots even though Shaq was still doing Shaq things. If Malone wasn't hurt, maybe they wouldn't have totally unraveled, but that was just not a championship team. The chemistry just wasn't there.