LaMarcus Aldridge had played through this before.
The Nets’ All-Star big man was diagnosed with Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome during his 2006-07 rookie season in Portland. According to the Mayo Clinic, it’s a condition in which an extra electrical pathway between your heart’s upper and lower chambers causes a rapid heartbeat. In Aldridge’s case, it caused a minor heart arrhythmia his rookie season, another in 2011, and an unrelated and equally concerning flare-up with the Spurs in 2017.
So when it happened again in an April 10, 2021 matchup between the Nets and Lakers, Aldridge had a game plan, and not the one Steve Nash was serving. He had seen heart specialists in San Antonio, Baltimore and Austin. The plan was supposed to be bulletproof.
But it wasn’t. Far from it.
Aldridge looked polished on offense — 12 points on 5-of-8 shooting from the field — but he was pummeled by Andre Drummond on a low-post possession. Drummond scored an and-one on that play, then put his hand parallel to the floor, a gesture universally known as “too small” that was repeated by everyone on the Laker bench.
All the while, Aldridge’s heart was racing with an irregular beat. It was the last time he touched the floor in a Nets jersey. Retirement came next.
Everything he thought he knew about his condition went out the window in one game. Up to that point, the game plan for his heart arrhythmia was as efficient as his mid-range jumper. An off game on the court pales in comparison to an off day for your body.
“Say you have something wrong with you, and then they say ‘A, B and C is going to happen,'” Aldridge explained as his process on Media Day. “B should take care of A and C should take care of B, so it’s a way to get out of it.
“So if you have this checklist in your mind of something you’ve dealt with your whole career and how to get out of it, and you do all three of those things and you don’t get out of it, then you start freaking out. ‘OK, like, this is what I’ve kind of learned and what I’ve been taught. This is how I fix what’s going on.’ So that night, A, B and C wasn’t working for me. So I was like, what is this?”
Aldridge got home and his heart continued beating at an irregular rhythm. Then came the chest tightness. Then came the fear.
“It was just a combination of things I had never experienced that came after what I had never experienced,” he said. “There was just kind of an overwhelming 24 hours of new experiences with a heart condition that (three heart specialists) put together a game plan for me for how I should feel or what should happen in each stage of the game, workout, whatever. So it’s like all that research was flushed down the drain in one game because I had never been in that position before.”
Neither had Nets GM Sean Marks, who spoke to Aldridge on a number of occasions after his abrupt retirement. Aldridge’s first concern was quality of life: Would he be able to live the same way he was accustomed? When it became clear the answer was yes, the hooper inside began to take control.
First it was the treadmill. Could he get his heart rate up safely without putting himself in jeopardy?
“I think that was the first goal,” Aldridge said. “Everyday life quality, being comfortable with that.”
Then came the tests, which he passed with flying colors. Then came his agent, followed by more conversations with Marks, who tried to talk him out of coming out of retirement.
“I said, ‘Why? You don’t need this. Why would you come back?” Marks said. “I think it’s important to see the conviction. And it’s not conviction made without really doing your due diligence. He had already gone above and beyond in terms of talking to specialists and so forth, and being cleared. He wouldn’t have made that comment to me and have had those conversations without already taking those steps. And then we further did our own testing, he’s been up here with our doctors, and that’s where we arrived at the opportunity to bring him back.”
Aldridge was hellbent on his return, no different than Bruce Brown or Blake Griffin, a pair of Nets free agents that re-signed in Brooklyn to complete the task at hand. That unfinished business is clear: A team sapped of its health by one freak injury after another fell short of tangible championship goals in a second-round loss to the Milwaukee Bucks.
Aldridge said he talked to one other team in free agency, but knew in his heart he wanted to be in Brooklyn.
“I wasn’t ready to stop for one, and two, I was helping — I’m biased — I was helping the best team in the NBA win games and I was fitting in well and I was having fun and I was enjoying basketball,” he said. “So that’s why. I still love the game. I’m still capable of helping this team win. I still can bring something to the table. So that’s why. I still love the game and I want to play.”
