LaMarcus Aldridge Walks Away, Because Ball Isn’t Life - The Ringer

A few weeks back, when the NBA world decided that LaMarcus Aldridge signing for the veteran’s minimum to be the fifth big man in the Brooklyn Nets’ frontcourt rotation was a cardinal sin worth rending garments over, I thought about the past that served as prelude to all the buyout market Sturm und Drang?

The best teams Aldridge had ever played on never reached the promised land.

“My last game, I played while dealing with an irregular heartbeat.

This isn’t the first time Aldridge has dealt with an irregular heartbeat; he’d had several cardiac episodes during his career, most recently a “minor arrhythmia” that sidelined him late in the 2016-17 season.

And at 35 years old, Aldridge still has an awful lot of that ahead of him.

“The Nets organization fully supports LaMarcus’s decision, and while we value what he has brought to our team during his short time in Brooklyn, his health and well-being are far more important than the game of basketball,” Nets general manager Sean Marks said in a team statement.

“We know this was not an easy decision for him, but after careful consideration and consultation with numerous medical experts, he made the best decision for him, his family and for his life after basketball.”.

His life in basketball will likely look incomplete to some eyes, a product of the decades-long tilt toward evaluating a player’s career solely by counting the championship rings on his fingers.

At 6-foot-11 and 250 pounds, a level of bulk that belied the balletic grace he evinced as he pivoted and pirouetted, Aldridge presented a rare package of size, skill, and scoring touch, averaging at least 17 points per game for 13 straight seasons.

Watching him work from the left block was like attending a master class in low-post footwork: Year after year, he bedeviled the best interior defenders in the business with an evil array of feints, counters, step-throughs, and turnaround fadeaways.

Two years later, after he’d left Portland on somewhat rocky terms to sign in San Antonio—a marquee free-agent addition intended to extend the championship-contending window of Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, and Manu Ginobili—Aldridge put that same evil on Serge Ibaka, Steven Adams, and the rest of Oklahoma City’s young bigs, hanging 79 points on them on 33-for-44 shooting in games 1 and 2 of their 2016 second-round series:.

Chris Bosh—another supremely gifted scoring 4 from Texas whom Aldridge battled in high school, and like Aldridge, a player whose career ended prematurely due to health concerns—is a sure thing, too, thanks to the championship rings and Olympic gold absent from Aldridge’s trophy case.

“I like my little shell,” Aldridge told Pina

If there’s a silver lining to Thursday’s surprise announcement, then, maybe it’s this: that LaMarcus Aldridge, forever overlooked and underrated, will finally get his flowers