HEAT COMMENTARY Haslem’s 40 for 40

HEAT COMMENTARY
Haslem’s 40 for 40
Twenty years of fights, rebounds, ‘The Hansbrough Game’ and finding Dwyane Wade’s stolen property
Miami Heat forward and Gators alum Udonis Haslem will be celebrated at his final regular-season home game on Sunday. John McCall/South Florida Sun Sentinel
Mr. Miami, Mr. 305, No. 40, Udonis Haslem, will have his final regular-season home game Sunday after 20 years with the Miami Heat.
A 40 for 40 to mark the day:
1. Haslem has said a few times over his years, “Nothing happens in Miami without me knowing.” One example? “One of the first times out with Dwyane [Wade], somebody broke into his car and stole his jewelry,” he said. “Somebody called me the next day and said where it was. He was skeptical about getting it back. We got it back.”
2. Undrafted, cut by Atlanta and having played in France, he singles out a play in the 2003 Heat training camp for making the team. “A shot went up, the rebound went all the way to half court and I chased it,” he said. “I was only one to chase it to half court. [Coach Pat Riley] blew the whistle. He looked at me and said, ‘Everyone else stopped, why didn’t you?’ I said, ‘I didn’t hear a whistle.’ I had a different desperation.”
3. He’s the Heat’s career leader with 5,718 rebounds. He doesn’t have a favorite one, but singles out his third NBA game when he had 11 rebounds against Detroit strongman Ben Wallace. “That told me I could play here,” he said.
4. Coach Erik Spoelstra: “My second year, I had to call time out and talked about how the scheme was messed up. He hit my clipboard and it bounced 25 feet away and he cursed me and the unit, saying it had nothing to do with the X’s and O’s or scheme, that it was about competitive will and a lot of other expletives. ... As soon as we’re breaking the huddle he comes back with my clipboard and says, ‘Sorry about that and it is about the scheme but I had to make that point.’ I said, ‘From now on you can interrupt and throw my clipboard whenever you want.”
5. Haslem on Haslem: “I see myself as a guy who had to work twice as hard to get at the seat table with the common man.”
6. Teammate Shaquille O’Neal complained one game about not getting officiating calls. “Shut the [expletive], you’re the biggest [expletive] out here,” the Heat legend had Haslem tell him.
7. “I probably said something like that,” Haslem said. “Shaq probably went out and kicked [expletive], too. It’s all alphas out there. You just want to bring out the best in guys.”
8. He played with a separated shoulder in guarding Dallas star Dirk Nowitzki in the final game of the 2006 NBA Finals to help deliver the Heat’s first title.
9. What’s The Heat Way? “The
hard way,” he said.
10. He calls fake-tough guys, “Studio.” Boston’s Kevin Garnett, he once said, “wouldn’t throw rice at a wedding.”
11. Cleveland offered him $10 million more than the five-year, $34 million deal he accepted to stay with the Heat in 2005. The Big Three — LeBron James, Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh — then took less upon signing so Haslem could fit under the salary cap in 2010.
12. His least favorite fight: “I got into it in practice with Gary Payton and Riles kicked us both out. No punches were thrown. I think Gary went and got a broomstick. He was about to go hit me or something but it never came to that.”
13. His favorite fight: “Hansbrough,” he said.
14. Haslem was cut above his eye and needed eight stitches the game before what’s known as “The Hansbrough Game,” in the 2013 playoff series against Indiana. “There was no issue there,” Haslem said of his stitches. “I’ll take mine like a man, because I can dish it and I can take it. But when I saw Dwyane [get hit], I felt a little different about that.”
15. Center Tyler Hansbrough knocked a driving Wade down hard. The Heat called time-out, “Spo, stay out of it,” Haslem told Spoelstra. “This [expletive]’s gonna happen.” Next possession, Hansbrough took a pass moving to the basket and Haslem flattened him. Haslem was ejected.
16. “They were trying to have mental edge over us by beating us,” Haslem says of Indiana that series. “That’s’ how they thought they could beat us. We had to respond to that.”
17. Wade gave Haslem the game ball after The Hansbrough Game. (Haslem gave Wade a book by motivational writer T.D. Jakes the night before the game. “I don’t read just to read,” he said. “I read for a purpose.”)
18. That wasn’t the only time he protected Wade. When Lance Stephenson blew in LeBron James’ ear in the 2014 playoffs, Haslem said from the bench to Stephenson, “I’m going to [expletive] you up.”
19. “He’s been a positive voice in my ear since I got here — and a devil’s advocate,” Heat center Bam Adebayo said. “He’s never going to give you a compliment. Never. You can have 100 points a game and he’ll say you could’ve had 150.”
20. “The best story about him is that game against Philadelphia and Dwight Howard,” Adebayo said.
21. In the last game of the 2021 regular season, Haslem played his first game of the season. He lasted three minutes. After being shoved to the floor by Howard at one end, Haslem is ejected for pushing his hand in Howard’s face and going jaw-to-jaw with him. “If this is the last one, I finished it the only way Udonis Haslem could: with an ejection,” he said.
22. That night’s defining stat: He was only player in 20 years to play in one game in a season and get ejected from it.
23. “What a way to go out,” O’Neal said on the TNT halftime show.
24. He didn’t go out.
25. He’s played in 63 games the past seven years to make him the highest-paid player per active minute. The cost: $45,268 per minute.
26. Asked what he sees his role as when playing such few minutes — a question he’s told was asked of others — he says, “What does Spo say?”
27. “Two weeks ago we’re doing a practice where I wanted him just to give different looks defensively, versus switches or whatever,” Spoelstra says. “It wasn’t a Hunger Games practice. But ‘how you do anything is how you do everything.’ That defines UD. He can’t go half-speed. I wanted to put him on Tyler [Herro] just to have a bigger body on the switch player. He was going all out, like it was a Finals game, so the offensive group couldn’t get anything accomplished going three-quarters speed.”
28. Says Haslem: ‘That’s my mindset in practice every day. Those are my games. My mindset is I have to be twice, four times, 10 times, what the other guys bring. That’s where I have to make my contribution.”
29. When Atlanta guard Jeremy Lin lost his shoe in 2019 and Wade started to hand it back, Haslem slapped it out of Wade’s hand. Help an opponent? Wade cussed at Haslem. The two best friends say they nearly fought right then.
30. Last March, when Jimmy Butler challenged Spoelstra in a time-out huddle, it wasn’t just the coach who had words with Butler. Haslem took a step toward him, saying, “I’m going to beat your [expletive].”
31. “Nobody ever cares that there’s seat belts in a Ferrari, but Udonis Haslem is the seatbelt — if anything goes wrong, he locks them up,” former NBA center Channing Frye said on JJ Reddick’s podcast.
32. The Liberty City kid whose favored food growing up was a Subway sandwich now owns two Subway franchises. “Everything I do is genuine like that,” he says.
33. Other companies he owns: A pizza restaurant, two bagel shops, two Auntie Anne’s pretzel franchises, two affordable housing projects and three medical marijuana dispensaries. “Getting people jobs is a big thing,” he says.
34. He’s completing an eight-story, “one-stop shop for mental health,” he said. It consists of a rehabilitation clinic with 200 beds over the first six floors. “The top two floors you move into are affordable housing,” he said.
35. Why this? “I watched my mom go through drug addiction,” he said. “I saw the problem. I’m always looking where there’s a need. I have access to people that no one hears. I hear what they’re going through. I’ve seen it. I can bridge that gap, sit down with commissioners or whoever.”
36. “Dwyane and I help each other all the time [in business],” he said. “We’re always sending clips to each other about successful businessmen. … I’ve got something else going on, but the papers aren’t signed yet so I can’t say.”
37. He notes Michael Jordan supposedly made more money after basketball. “That’s the goal,” he says. “To be more successful after basketball.”
38. What’s he look forward to in retirement? Food. He grew up on pork, but quit eating it — “not even a strip of bacon,” he once said — in going from 300 pounds in France to 230 when making the Heat in 2003.
39. For that year in France, he remembers only eating turkey sandwiches. He also kept the clock set to Miami time. He was on that time his 20-year career.
40. On why he’s retiring now, he says, “It’s time.”