Seven years after he last played in an NBA game, Dwyane Wade has that old look back again.<\/p>\n
The Miami Heat revealed enhancements to its Wade statue outside of its home arena that had been widely ridiculed since it was unveiled in October 2024 for looking nothing like the 13-time All-Star.<\/p>\n
The square face and large jaw on the original bronze \u201clikeness\u201d only resembled Wade in that the depiction was wearing a No. 3 Miami Heat jersey. The updated statue, which the Heat said had \u201cenhancements,\u201d now bears a striking resemblance to the franchise\u2019s record holder in games played with 948 and points with 21,556.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had to ask myself a pretty simple question: \u2018If people don\u2019t feel that connection when they look at the face, why wouldn\u2019t we try to make it better?’\u201d Wade, 44, wrote on the Substack platform. \u201cSo, we listened and had honest conversations with everyone involved, and we all agreed to make adjustments to the head.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Wade statue, located near the main entrance of Kaseya Center, had been hidden beneath a plywood box in recent days.<\/p>\n
The statue depicts the end of a 2009 game against the Chicago Bulls when Wade made the game-winning shot in double overtime and jumped on top of a table near courtside while yelling, \u201cThis is my house.\u201d<\/p>\n
Named to the NBA\u2019s 75th anniversary team in 2021, Wade was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2023.<\/p>\n
Wade played all but 106 regular-season games of his career in a Heat uniform (2003-16, 2018-19), with averages of 22.0 points, 4.7 rebounds and 5.4 assists over 16 seasons including with Chicago (2016-17) and Cleveland (2017-18). The fifth-overall draft pick in 2003 by the Heat, Wade was a three-time NBA champion and 2006 NBA Finals MVP. He was NBA scoring champion in 2008-09 when he averaged 30.2 points.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Seven years after he last played in an NBA game, Dwyane Wade has that old look back again.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":670278,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[307,304,305,306,308,93,61,60],"class_list":["post-670277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/670277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=670277"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/670277\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/670278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=670277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=670277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=670277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}