MIAMI (AP) — Goran Dragic, a previous All-Star guard with the Miami Heat and the leader of Slovenia’s crew that received the EuroBasket championship in 2017, introduced his retirement on Sunday.
Dragic used 15 seasons in the NBA and performed for seven teams — Phoenix, Houston, Chicago, Brooklyn, Milwaukee, Toronto and the Heat. He was element of the All-NBA workforce in 2013-14, the same season in which he was voted the league’s most improved participant, and created his lone All-Star overall look in 2018.
“I have lived my finest aspiration and I am incredibly grateful for the a great number of individuals in my everyday living who have enabled me to play this extended,” Dragic said. “It starts off with my parents, Marinko and Mojca, my brother, Zoran, my young children, Mateo and Vikorita and their mom Maja, and the rest of my family who normally allowed this enthusiasm of basketball to be a priority for me.”
Dragic intends to have a retirement celebration this summer time in Ljubljana, Slovenia, probable soon after the Paris Olympics conclude. There are tentative plans to announce facts of that celebration later this week.
The 37-12 months-outdated Dragic spoke typically in current many years about what the 2017 EuroBasket get intended to him, in particular looking at that it is typically regarded to be Slovenia’s greatest moment in staff sports activities. Dragic averaged 22.6 details and 5.1 helps in the 9 game titles at that tournament and concluded off the gold with 35 points in the title game earn about rival Serbia, his father’s homeland. Slovenia is his mother’s homeland.
He turned a nationwide hero, acquiring just one of Slovenia’s optimum civilian honors just after that event, and was brought to tears by a gift of a jersey from the mother of 1 of his idols, the late star Drazen Petrovic.
“It was everything,” Dragic stated.
A younger guard on that 2017 Slovenia team that Dragic mentored: Dallas Mavericks star Luka Doncic.
“It was an astounding operate for him,” Doncic claimed Saturday, when term started to leak out of Europe that Dragic’s retirement announcement was imminent. “I’m just glad I know him, I’m happy I performed with him and gentleman, I uncovered a great deal about him, especially about management in that match.”
Dragic was beloved in Miami, wherever he and his household continue on to preserve households. When he was a no cost agent in 2020, the Heat shocked Dragic with billboards in his indigenous Slovenia, with slogans these kinds of as “Your next household is constantly with you.” That gesture, Dragic explained, was deeply relocating and led to him quickly re-signing with the Heat.
The left-handed Dragic was the 45th in general decide in the 2008 draft by San Antonio. He averaged 13.3 factors and 4.7 helps in his occupation, and averaged 20 points in a season two times — in 2013-14 with Phoenix, and 2016-17 with the Warmth.
He helped Miami get to the NBA Finals in 2020, the time that ended in the bubble at Walt Disney Entire world for the reason that of the COVID-19 pandemic. Dragic damage his foot early in that sequence and appeared in only two games, an damage that severely impacted Miami’s probabilities at a title.
“Can you do some thing for me?” he asked a reporter when that collection from the Los Angeles Lakers finished, the Heat getting missing in six online games. “Tell the lovers we actually tried out and I’m sorry. I seriously experimented with.”
Dragic thanked a extended record of men and women for their involvement in his career, including David Stern and Adam Silver — the NBA’s two commissioners throughout his tenure — along with coaches, crew executives and his agents Rade Filipovich and Invoice Duffy.
“All good factors come to an conclusion but this dream of basketball will usually be with me,” Dragic explained.
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