The Miami Heat will retire Shaquille O'Neal's number
Nearly nine years after dealing him to Phoenix in a trade you’ve already forgotten, the Miami Heat will honor former center Shaquille O’Neal with the fourth retired jersey in the franchise’s history in December. The ceremony, in a game pitched against O’Neal’s former Los Angeles Lakers team, will take place on Dec. 22.
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A member of the Heat from 2004 through Feb. 2008, O’Neal helped lead the squad to its 2000-06 NBA title, and seemed well on his way toward pushing Miami to its first Finals appearance in 2004-05 prior to a ill-timed toe injury suffered during the 2005 Eastern Conference finals. Acquired in a package including Lamar Odom to help give Dwyane Wade the superstar support he needed, O’Neal averaged 19.6 points, 9.1 rebounds, 2.1 assists and 1.9 blocks per contest in 31.1 minutes a game in his career with the Heat.
From the team’s press release:
The HEAT announced today that they will retire Shaquille O’Neal’s No. 32 jersey in a special halftime ceremony on December 22nd at AmericanAirlines Arena when the HEAT take on the Los Angeles Lakers. The ceremony, which will be hosted by HEAT Television Play-By-Play Announcer, Eric Reid, will include a video presentation and the raising of the No. 32 retirement banner to the rafters of the Arena. O’Neal and HEAT President, Pat Riley, are also scheduled to address the fans. In addition, TV broadcast partner, FOX Sports Sun, will air the entire ceremony live on the local television broadcast. O’Neal will become the third HEAT player to have his jersey retired, joining HEAT greats Alonzo Mourning and Tim Hardaway.
(The “fourth retired jersey in the franchise’s history” reference above is not a typo. For whatever reason, in 2003, the Heat decided to retire Michael Jordan’s jersey as his embarrassing career with the Washington Wizards came to an end. Jordan never played a game with the Miami Heat, yet his No. 23 hangs in the rafters.)
Earlier in autumn we relayed the idea that Pat Riley had after his summer gone wrong, insisting that the acquisition of Shaq in 2004 was bigger for the franchise than that week it secured the rights to Wade, LeBron James, and Chris Bosh:
“I’ll say this, and I mean this,” Riley says during a relaxed moment this past week, “Shaq’s acquisition was bigger than any acquisition that we ever made, including the Big Three.”
If that seems a bit off, it’s because it is. Shaq nearly led the Heat to a Finals appearance in 2005 and was the second-best player on a team that won the title in 2006, but the Heat were swept out of the first round of the playoffs in 2007 by Chicago: O’Neal’s playoffs career with Miami ended with four straight losses.
LeBron and Co. went to four NBA Finals, winning twice, in his time with the club. However he and Dwyane Wade (and, in due time we sadly suspect, Chris Bosh) have apparently since gone wrong in their ways, via Pat’s prism, while O’Neal will get his own night soon enough.
Declining to 14-point, eight-rebound outputs in 2007-08 on a lottery team and about to hit age 36, O’Neal was dealt by Riley to the Phoenix Suns prior to 2008’s trade deadline for Shawn Marion: Miami would go on to nearly win the lottery that year, and selected consensus No. 2 overall pick Michael Beasley for its trouble. Marion played a year for a Heat team in flux before being dealt to Toronto for Jermaine O’Neal.
Shaq went on to play for the Cavaliers and Celtics following the move to Phoenix, before retiring in 2011.
That is to say, the Heat will have had nearly five full years’ worth of games to honor O’Neal following his retirement by the time the Dec. 22 ceremony hits, and the franchise did well to save the celebration for its worst season since Shaq’s last campaign with the Heat. In the team’s first year without Dwyane Wade since 2002-03, Miami has lost eight of 12 games to start 2016-17 entering play in Philadelphia on Monday night.
Shaq, despite the 205-regular season game and 45-playoff game resume with Miami, still has had his way within the team’s all-time ledger:
O’Neal is still Miami’s all-time leader in field goal percentage (.596) and ranks third in scoring average (19.6), sixth in blocks (384), seventh in free throws attempted (1,708), eighth in offensive rebounds (621), ninth in double-doubles (84), 11th in total rebounds (1,856), 12th in defensive rebounds (1,235), 12th in field goals made (1,612), 13th in free throws made (786), 14th in points (4,010), 14th in double-figure scoring games (191), 14th in starts (203) and 15th in field goals attempted (2,703). Among the HEAT’s all-time postseason leaders, O’Neal ranks second in dunks (116), fourth in free throws attempted (315), fifth in double-doubles (15), fifth in double-figure scoring games (37), fifth in 20-point games (16), sixth in field goals made (312), sixth in total rebounds (361), sixth in offensive rebounds (110), sixth in defensive rebounds (251), sixth in blocks (59), seventh in points (751), seventh in free throws made (127), seventh in games started (40), eighth in field goal attempts (531) and ninth in minutes (1,311).
Those marks, along with the championship, are enough to warrant inclusion in the rafters in a general sense. In less-broad sense – this is owner Micky Arison and Pat Riley’s team. O’Neal helped push the Heat over the time after years of being hamstrung by injury, age, illness, or Michael Jordan-woes. If he reminds of cheerier times gone by, despite the less-cheery fallout of a productive relationship in 2007-08, then this is their call.
What’s also worth being catty about, as is usually the case when Shaquille O’Neal and Pat Riley are involved, are the various personal dramas that typically walk hand-in-hand with discussions centering on these two giant basketball personalities. To pitch this game against the Lakers, while Chicago Bulls guard Dwyane Wade muses about his own eventual Heat legacy, is telling.
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Kelly Dwyer is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at KDonhoops@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
