The Miami Heat will retire Shaquille O’Neal’s No. 32 jersey
Not a bad couple of weeks for Shaquille O’Neal. First, he finds out that he’s going to get a statue at Staples Center, and now he learns that the Miami Heat are going to retire his number.
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We’re Shaq’ing Up!
#32 is headed to the @aaarena rafters in 2016. Congrats @SHAQ!https://t.co/RbzASg8Rfm
— Miami HEAT (@MiamiHEAT) February 9, 2016
The Heat announced Tuesday plans to retire the No. 32 jersey that O’Neal wore from the summer of 2004 through the winter of 2008, a period that included three All-Star appearances and two All-NBA First Team nods for Shaq individually, and three division titles, two Eastern Conference finals trips and the first NBA championship in Heat history. Early in the 2016-17 NBA season, O’Neal will become the third former Heat player to see his jersey hoisted to the rafters of AmericanAirlines Arena. (The organization, famously, also displays jerseys honoring Michael Jordan and Dan Marino “for their overall contributions to sports, but those are not considered retired jerseys by the Heat,” according to Ira Winderman of the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
“Shaquille O’Neal is one of the truly elite players in the history of the game and one of the greatest players to ever wear a Heat uniform,” Heat President Pat Riley said in a team statement. “He took us to another level as a basketball franchise while leading us to our first NBA championship. Retiring his number in the rafters, along with Heat greats Alonzo Mourning and Tim Hardaway, is something we are very proud of.”
O’Neal came to Miami after spending eight years in L.A., joining the Heat in a trade that sent Lamar Odom, Caron Butler, Brian Grant, a future first-round pick and a future second-round pick to the Lakers. After beginning his career as the centerpiece of the Orlando Magic’s early-’90s rise to prominence, Shaq returned to Florida with one goal in mind: teaming with ascendant young star Dwyane Wade to bring the Heat their first championship.
He led the NBA in shooting percentage in each of his first two seasons in Miami, averaging a shade under 22 points, 10 rebounds and 2.5 assists per game while blocking two shots a night. Stan Van Gundy’s Heat went 59-23 in his first season in South Florida, but fell to the Detroit Pistons in seven games in the 2005 Eastern Conference finals, which saw Shaq — who had finished second in MVP voting during the regular season, behind Phoenix Suns point guard Steve Nash, but who was suffering from a deep thigh bruise in the postseason — stifled somewhat on the interior by a Detroit group featuring Ben Wallace, Rasheed Wallace, Antonio McDyess and Elden Campbell.
An early-season ankle injury knocked O’Neal out for 18 games the following season; after Van Gundy stepped down “due to personal and family reasons,” Riley took over on the bench, O’Neal returned, and the Wade-led Heat finished 52-30 before knocking off the Pistons in six in an Eastern Conference finals rematch and going on to beat the Dallas Mavericks in the NBA Finals, giving Miami its first NBA championship and earning O’Neal, who averaged 13.7 points, 10.2 rebounds and 2.8 assists per game in the Wade-dominated series, his fourth championship ring.
The good times wouldn’t last, however. O’Neal missed more than half the 2006-07 season due to injury for a Heat team whose title defense ended in a four-game sweep at the hands of the Chicago Bulls in the opening round of the 2007 playoffs. Things got even worse the following year, as an aging Shaq’s declining production, combined with team-wide struggles, led to a hellacious Miami losing streak, rising tempers and, as Shaq told Jackie MacMullan in his 2011 book “Shaq Uncut,” the beginning of the end:
My ticket out of town was punched in mid-February. There was a lot of tension between Pat and the players. So we’re about to start practice and [point guard] Jason Williams comes in about ten seconds late.
Pat being Pat, he starts swearing at him and screaming, “Get the hell out of here!”
He and JWill start yelling at each other, and JWill turns to go and kicks over the training cart. He sends pieces of Wrigley gum flying all over the place. He’s walking away and I say, “JWill. Come back. Don’t go anywhere.”
Pat hears me so he starts going ballistic on me. Now, JWill was my guy. I kind of brought him there, so I felt responsible for him.
I tell Pat we’re a team and we need to stick together, not throw guys out of the gym. Pat is screaming at me and says if I don’t like it, then I should get the hell out of practice, too.
That’s when I said, “Why don’t you make me?”
I take a couple of steps towards Pat. Udonis Haslem steps in and I shove him out of the way. Then Zo tries to grab me. I threw him aside like he was a rag doll.
Now it’s me and Riley face-to-face, jaw to jaw. I’m poking him in the chest and he keeps slapping my finger away and it’s getting nasty. Noisy, too. He’s yelling “F*** you!” and I’m yelling back, “No, f*** you!”
Zo is trying to calm us both down and he has this kind of singsong panic in his voice. He keeps saying, “Big fella, no big fella, big fella!” I finally turn around and tell him, “Don’t worry. I’m not going to hit the man. Do you think I’m crazy?”
At that point Pat decides that practice is over. He walks out and goes to his downstairs office, and everyone just kind of stands there. Nobody is sure what to do. […] Obviously that was the end of me in Miami.
Before long, Shaq was on his way out to the desert to join Nash on the Suns in exchange for Shawn Marion and Marcus Banks. About a month and a half after the deal, O’Neal sniped at Riley and the Heat organization in a chat with MacMullan published in the Boston Globe:
“I love playing for this coach and I love playing with these guys,” said O’Neal yesterday. “We have professionals who know what to do. No one is asking me to play with Chris Quinn or Ricky Davis. I’m actually on a team again.”
Note the swipe at his former employers, the Miami Heat. When Pat Riley engineered the blockbuster trade that brought Shaq to South Beach, O’Neal promised to deliver a championship. He did, but the cost of sticking with an aging roster has left the franchise in a freefall ever since.
The once-blissful marriage between Shaq and Riles ended badly. As their championship core crumbled, so did their relationship. Heat officials believe Shaq quit on them and point to his chronic hip problems that prevented him from playing in Miami but have not stopped him from averaging 29.3 minutes a night with the Suns. Conversely, Shaq believes Riley quit on him and saddled him with the blame for the franchise’s implosion.
“I guess when you have a lot of power, you can do what you want,” O’Neal said. “Me? If I ever came into that kind of power, I think I’d be willing to admit it if I messed up.”
Riley, naturally, responded in kind:
“It’s sad that he says those things. We shared so much here, together, for three years, good and bad, 3½ years,” Riley said, referring specifically to the Heat’s 2006 NBA title. “I just think it’s sad that he’s got to do that.” […]
Riley said he doesn’t have “anything but good feelings for Shaq” and wasn’t bothered by any criticism leveled at him. But he said O’Neal has no reason to blame anyone else in the organization for his unhappiness.
“When you’re 9-40, we’re all frustrated. I mean everybody’s at fault, we all were. Everybody was feeling bad and nobody wants that,” Riley said.
“He didn’t want to be there, he didn’t want to play for that kind of situation, 35 years old. He wanted to go to a contender and we sent him there. We sent him to Utopia and we’re left here with the carnage and I don’t know why he’s not happy.”
You know what they say, though: time heals all wounds. With the benefit of distance — and Miami now having another couple of championships, thanks to Riley’s coup in luring LeBron James and Chris Bosh to play with Wade, the kind of feat that perhaps might not have been possible had the Shaq deal not previously proven Miami could be a championship destination — Riley, Shaq and everyone else involved seem willing to let bygones be bygones, celebrate a player that ranks third in franchise history in points per game and rebounds per game, second in blocks per game, and first in field-goal percentage for his contributions.
The Heat might not be the team with which most basketball fans associate Shaquille O’Neal — or, for that matter, the second — but there’s a chance Miami might never have reached the NBA’s most rarefied air had the Diesel never pulled into South Beach. For a franchise without decades upon decades of legends and lore to lean on, that seems like a bit of history worth celebrating.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
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