(Photo by Sarah Stier/Getty Images)
This weekend, Miami Heat legend Dwyane Wade will be inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame with some of his peers, including Pau Gasol, Tony Parker, Dirk Nowitzki, and legendary head coach Gregg Popovich.
With Wade getting immortalized as one of the greatest players ever to play the game of basketball, the three-time NBA champion is going to be praised for what he’s accomplished on the basketball court as well as being criticized, with some tending to focus on the negative.
During a recent appearance on “The Crossover,” Wade fired back at critics who took shots at him for his performance, claiming he shot too many free throws and was getting “superstar calls” in the 2006 NBA Finals, via Legion Hoops.
Dwyane Wade on the 2006 Finals:
“The excuse they pulled out for me is ‘Oh he shot a lot of free throws’. Well, why? Because of my attack. I attacked with that much force, and in all angles. Did I get a couple ‘superstar calls?’ You’re damn right. All superstars get them.”
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— Legion Hoops (@LegionHoops) August 9, 2023
As Wade pointed out, he was a superstar at that time, even though he had only been in the league for a short amount of time, and was still proving his worth while playing alongside fellow superstar Shaquille O’Neal in Miami.
Regardless of the criticism for the 2006 NBA Finals performance, the fact of the matter is he came out on top in that series against Nowitzki’s Dallas Mavericks and went on to appear in four more Finals and lifted the Larry O’Brien Trophy two more times before calling it a career.
Wade is, without a doubt, one of the all-time greats in the game, and if it weren’t for Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, he’d be in the discussion for being the greatest shooting guard in league history.
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