MIAMI (AP) — Bam Adebayo's sneakers were trimmed in gold. Fitting, given what the night was about.
Adebayo, Miami coach Erik Spoelstra and Heat forward Nikola Jovic were honored Monday night for their Olympic medal accomplishments at the Paris Games. Adebayo got another banner in the rafters by winning Olympic gold as a member of the Heat, joining the one from the Tokyo Games that were played in 2021.
Spoelstra was an assistant coach on the U.S. team in Paris, and Jovic won a bronze medal with Serbia. The banner with Adebayo's name and the U.S. flag was unveiled during a halftime ceremony of the Heat game against the Sacramento Kings. He stood with his mother, Marilyn Blount; she wore his gold medal from Tokyo around her neck and draped the gold medal from Paris around his as the brief ceremony started.
“Keep tallying them up," said Adebayo, Miami's captain and the first player to win two Olympic gold medals while playing for the Heat. "Obviously, it's something special. It keeps marking my name in the history books.”
Adebayo averaged 6.0 points and 3.7 rebounds in the six Olympic games for the Americans, who went undefeated in the tournament, rallied past Serbia in the semifinals and then held off host France to win a fifth consecutive gold medal with a late-game 3-point barrage by Stephen Curry serving as the capper.
“A couple days ago I was looking at some of the pictures from the trip,” said Spoelstra, who was part of the U.S. Olympic delegation as an assistant coach under Golden State's Steve Kerr. “It was such an intense, gratifying core memory. It was so much fun."
Adebayo's newest banner is the sixth in the Miami rafters to commemorate Olympic gold. The Heat started the tribute in 2008 after Dwyane Wade was part of the team that won at the Beijing Games and added retroactive ones not long afterward for Tim Hardaway and Alonzo Mourning — teammates on the team that won at the Sydney Games in 2000.
The others are for LeBron James, who was on the team that won at the London Games in 2012, and for Adebayo's win at Tokyo.
“I’m really happy for Bam,” Spoelstra said. “In a young career, he’s really stacking up a lot of things — two gold medals at his age, two trips to the finals. It just says a lot about him and how he can impact winning, how he can fit into a team that’s about winning. That’s his language.”
Current Heat players Kevin Love and Jimmy Butler also are Olympic gold medalists — but have no banners in Miami because they weren’t part of the Heat when they were on those teams. Same goes for former Heat players Christian Laettner, Penny Hardaway, Shaquille O’Neal, Gary Payton, Steve Smith, Ray Allen, Chris Bosh, Andre Iguodala and Kyle Lowry. They're all gold medalists, but those Olympic titles didn’t come during their Heat tenures. James' two golds that he won outside of his Heat years don't have banners, either.
Jovic was honored with a video tribute as part of the medal recognition night. He averaged 4.2 points for Serbia at the Olympics; that team went 4-2, with both losses coming to the U.S. He was also part of the Serbia team that won silver at the World Cup in 2023.
“That was a special team,” Spoelstra said. “What they did the last two summers, it's great.”
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AP NBA: https://apnews.com/hub/nba
Tim Reynolds, The Associated Press
