MIAMI – Peel back the sheets. Swing his legs to the right and sit up, so his feet hit the floor together.
That first step Victor Oladipo took every morning for the better part of two years as he got out of bed, whether while with the Pacers, Rockets or Heat, is how he knew something was wrong.
“It just felt like an uneasy, uncommon imbalance in my body, really — and every time I moved I could feel it,” he said.
Advertisement
But what, exactly, was the problem?
Oladipo had placed his full faith in the surgeons who worked on his torn right quadriceps in January 2019, so he believed the injury was properly addressed. But despite what Oladipo’s doctors were telling him, that he was likely dealing with post-operative tendonitis, each morning he felt like “someone was stabbing me in the knee with a knife.” Was his mind tricking him into feeling pain that wasn’t there? Can a trick last through 50-plus games over parts of two seasons?
And then, on April 8, 2021, while wearing a third team’s jersey in the span of a few months, Oladipo landed after a two-handed dunk against the Lakers and grabbed his right knee. By the time he caught up to the action at the other end of the floor, he was hobbling and waving to the Heat bench for help.
As it turned out, Oladipo wasn’t crazy. Something was still wrong with that right leg. He was headed for another surgery, on the same quadriceps, after the Heat’s doctors discovered the original procedure from three years earlier hadn’t fixed the underlying issue. But there was more damage done to Oladipo than just the area around his knee and thigh.
For a player who was at the top of his game before the injury, that lingering doubt over his leg was paralyzing, mentally. It led to unhappiness and uncertainty, two things that were alien to him, and it set forth a series of decisions and events that put Oladipo’s career in limbo. It left him searching for the player who seemed poised to become a perennial All-Star and the person who was once so sure of himself with a ball in his hand.
So when Oladipo finally returned to the court for the Heat last week, after nearly 11 months away from games, he wasn’t merely returning from another quadriceps surgery. He was coming back after a nasty fall from grace.
Advertisement
“It did affect me, going through all of those things,” Oladipo said last week, in an extended interview with The Athletic. “Feeling like people kind of wrote me off, and feeling like people are kind of being weird, moving weird around me as a person. It was just weird, and I didn’t help myself either. I had to change the people I was around, who I was letting represent me. I had to change who I was letting manage my life. I had to change a whole bunch of stuff.”
Oladipo, 29, was an All-Star in 2018 and 2019. He was a third-team All-NBA selection and the league’s leader in steals 2018. He was the best player on a Pacer team that pushed LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers to the brink of a stunning upset in the 2018 playoffs. The following season, after making his second All-Star team, he tore his quad, triggering that first surgery. And then…
- Oladipo missed a full calendar year, returning to the Pacers just before the pandemic struck. He toyed with not playing for Indiana in the Bubble, due to that lingering pain, but ultimately decided to play and was not himself while the Pacers were bounced in the first round. He averaged 14.5 points in his first 19 games back from surgery.
- Still hurting at the start of the 2020-21 season, while insisting publicly he was committed to Indiana, he convinced the Pacers privately he wouldn’t re-sign with them. The situation between Oladipo and the team was tense — as Oladipo alluded to above — until the Pacers traded him to the Rockets. Oladipo didn’t want to be in Houston, which was beginning a rebuild, and a few months after acquiring him, Houston traded Oladipo to Miami.
- While all of this was happening, Oladipo’s four-year, $85 million contract extension expired. He didn’t agree to further lucrative extensions with the Pacers, or the Rockets, and then he needed a second surgery in Miami. With almost no takers on the open market, Oladipo re-signed with the Heat last summer on a one-year, $2.4 million deal. The injuries and the clutter in his life cost him tens of millions.
Oladipo did indeed switch agents, from Aaron Turner to Jeff Schwartz and Javon Phillips at Excel Sports, though he said he takes responsibility for all that had transpired away from the court. He also said the original surgery on his right quad was done “incorrectly,” but added: “Who’s to say in 2019 they really knew about what was going on with quad tendons? I’m sure they know a lot more now so, you know, I don’t blame anyone.”
These last three years have caused a sea change in perspective for Oladipo. He tries to keep his distance from negativity. He knows he can’t make everyone happy. He trusts himself more.
“You pretty much trust your whole being and your career in certain people’s hands, and they kind of, unfortunately, fumbled it,” Oladipo said. “It’s a learning lesson. I trust my instinct more now than ever.”
The root cause of all of Oladipo’s troubles — the leg — finally feels better. He remembers the first time he tried a lunge to his right, during an early rehab session. His childhood friends were with him that day. They looked at him and he looked back, in shared joy and amazement. “I was like, whoa, that’s how it’s supposed to feel,” he said. “I’d forgotten how it felt to lean that way without any pain.”
Advertisement
Three-hundred and thirty-three days after he last played for the Heat, Oladipo returned to the court last week for the first of three games, all off the bench. He did not play Saturday on the second night of back-to-back games, out of precaution.
Oladipo’s stats are modest (6.7 points, 3.0 assists, .444 shooting), but he’s only averaging 16.3 minutes per game so far. The Heat have a slew of primary creators in Kyle Lowry, Tyler Herro and Jimmy Butler, and eventually, Miami will need to find the lineups where Oladipo can help the most.
That’s certainly the plan. Miami, for now the top team in the East, stood pat at the trade deadline and was idle in the buyout market, looking to Oladipo as the extra piece that would bolster its chances in the playoffs.
“This is going to be about us tempering the expectations,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said. “This is the biggest win of all, the fact that he had had three straight years of frustrating health and injury things that he was dealing with …and he’s out here, able to compete. We all want more, I’m sure he wants more. This is about discipline. We have to all be disciplined about this.”
Oladipo could interpret the opportunity he has now from a number of angles. He could play for that next contract, shooting to add an extra zero to it. He could press for more minutes or shots. He could try to take off from just in front of the foul line, rise over some 7-footer, and rock the rim on his head — like he used to.
All of that is coming, Oladipo said, now that he is healthy. In his knee and his head.
“I know when I’m right and I’m 100 percent physically what I’m capable of doing, so I don’t have to worry about anything but getting healthy,” Oladipo said. “I still plan on being really, really, really good at this game and I still plan on being one of the greats.”
Advertisement
That was the path Oladipo was on not so long ago; a path toward greatness. An injury and a surgery that didn’t quite work out sent him in another direction. He lost his star power and the size of his contract. He changed jerseys and agents and his outlook. But he thinks he can get all that back as he helps the Heat.
“The game, the world, kind of forgot about me,” he said. “It tests your faith. It tests you as a person and it helps you realize how strong you truly are.”
(Photo of Victor Oladipo: Michael Reaves/Getty Images)