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Heat’s Kyle Lowry not looking to end game with career, addresses his unique physique, trade rumors

If Kyle Lowry’s three-year contract with the Miami Heat that takes him through the 2023-24 season at age 38 is viewed as part of some type of end game, then the veteran point guard warns not to count him out.

During an appearance on the VC Show podcast with Vince Carter, Lowry said he plans to play as long as he can contribute.

“This is how I think: When you tell your brain something, it starts to do it,” Lowry said. “So, for me, I’m saying, ‘I’ll go until I can’t.’ Why not? Until I don’t want to wake up at 5, 6 in the morning and go work out.

“Every year I still find ways to be motivated.”

Lowry said he was further fueled by the Heat coming within one victory of advancing to last season’s NBA Finals, three years after winning the 2019 NBA championship with the Toronto Raptors.

“Right now, I’m even more motivated because I had a chance to make it to another championship,” he said. “There’s something about that championship that I want another one. It’s just what I play for.”

Because the Heat have been linked to trades for Kevin Durant and Donovan Mitchell, among others, this offseason, it has meant another offseason of dealing with trade rumors. Lowry’s three career relocations came with his approval, after the Memphis Grizzlies drafted point guard Mike Conley Jr., after differences with Houston Rockets coach Kevin McHale, and then when he sought to leave the Raptors for the Heat in the 2021 offseason amid a Toronto move toward a makeover.

“I understand it’s business,” he told Carter, another iconic former Raptor. “I understood this thing was a business from literally draft night of going into my second year when they drafted Mike Conley.

“I knew about the business fairly early.”

So he instead is moving forward as he does during typical offseasons.

“How I handle it is I don’t pay attention to it,” Lowry said. “I understand, listen, it’s rumors until it happens. And there’s nothing you can do about it. And hopefully you have a good enough agent who’s on it and in constant communication. But if it happens, it happens, and you move on.”

Lowry’s first Heat season ended with his conditioning standing as a talking point by Heat President Pat Riley and coach Erik Spoelstra.

That had Lowry laughing with Carter about the variety of memes of him over the years with the THICC urban slang for his ample posterior.

“It used to bother me a lot. It used to get to me. It used to really get to me, I’ll be honest with you. And now I don’t care,” Lowry said. “For me, a man that’s never been crazy athletic, THICC, whatever, I’m looking at . . . yeah, THICC has been good for me.”

He then listed all his career accolades, including his 2019 championship, achieved amid questions about his physique.

“Y’all can create all the memes you want,” he said. “I embrace it. I love it.”

He also said he embraced his first season in the Heat’s culture, in his own, veteran, way, alluding to a conversation with Spoelstra after he joined the team last August.

“We had a meeting in Vegas when I first agreed to the deal we signed. I said, ‘Listen coach, I understand the Miami Heat culture, I understand the Miami Heat way.’ I do,” said Lowry, who is due $28.3 million this season, $29.7 milloin in 2023-24. “I said, ‘But, we’re grown . . . men; I’m going to do some grown-man things.’

“But Spo was so receptive and so appreciative of it, because I’d never do anything, I never did anything that harmed what they did, harmed the Heat culture.”

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Source: Berkshire mont

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