There are not many professional athletes who have gone on to have successful NBA careers while suffering medical issues. Basketball is a grueling and physically demanding sport, and having a medical condition might be enough to halt a career for most players.
However, some endured and went on to have lengthy careers in the NBA. Some did know about their condition, while some were discovered after their playing days were over.
Here are ten players with rare medical issues but still pushed on and played in the NBA.
Which NBA players had rare medical issues but continued playing basketball?
DeJuan Blair
Blair had a short but memorable seven-year stint in the NBA from 2009 to 2016. During his high school years, he had two surgeries that left him with no anterior cruciate ligaments (ACLs) in both of his knees.
Before the 2009 NBA Draft, many teams elected not to select Blair due to his medical issue. The Spurs selected him as the 37th pick in 2009. Blair became a successful rotation player for Coach Popovich, often backing up Tim Duncan for four seasons.
Despite having no ACLs, Blair played 424 combined games for the Spurs, Mavericks, and Wizards before embarking on an international career for three more years before leaving basketball for good in 2019.
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Chris Wright
If you haven’t heard about Chris Wright, you’d be forgiven because he only lasted three games in the NBA. Even though he had a relatively forgettable stint with the Mavericks in 2013, he became the only known NBA player who suffered from multiple sclerosis.
According to Wikipedia, multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune disease that results in damage to myelin in the brain or spinal cord. Some known symptoms of the disease are vision loss, eye pain, loss of sensation, and muscle pain.
Wright’s NBA career may be extremely short, but he played professional basketball for twelve years, specifically in Europe and South America.
Monty Williams
While most people remember Monty Williams as the coach of the Phoenix Suns from 2019 to 2023, the former 6-foot-8 forward played nine years in the NBA despite suffering from a heart condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.
How serious was his condition? Before being selected 24th overall in 1994, Williams sat out two years at Notre Dame because of his medical issue. Nonetheless, Williams went on to play 456 career games, starting 109 of them.
Jeff Green
Jeff Green is a living testament when it comes to NBA players who had long and successful careers despite having a serious medical issue, in his case, an aortic aneurysm.
In 2012, underwent an open-heart surgery to repair his heart condition. The surgery involved stopping his heart for an hour, and the doctors advised him to wear a pad on his chest during practices and games.
Drafted in 2007, “Uncle Jeff,” as he’s fondly called, is still an active player to this day and has played 1217 games for multiple teams. He became an NBA champion in 2023 as a member of the Nuggets and has no plans of stepping down just yet.
Shawn Respert
Speaking of scarier medical issues, Shawn Respert was bothered by stomach cramps at the end of his rookie campaign with Milwaukee in 1996. Subsequently, he noticed a lump below his belly button that was concerning. Tests confirmed that he had stomach cancer, and he immediately underwent radiation for three straight months.
Nobody knew about his condition except for a few people within the Bucks organization, and his closest family members were kept in the dark about his cancer battle. Even though he had a full recovery and resumed his NBA career until 1999, Respert’s diagnosis did not come to light until 2005.
Respert said that he never intended for his family to know about his cancer scare, even reportedly saying, “People don’t want to hear excuses in pro sports, even if the excuse is cancer.”
Now that’s badass.
Pete Maravich
It was not until Maravich died in 1988 at the young age of 40 that it was discovered posthumously that he had a congenital heart defect, in this case, a missing left coronary artery.
Due to the lack of testing during his playing career, Maravich’s heart condition went undiagnosed.
It did not stop him from having a stellar career, though. In ten years playing in the league, Maravich was selected as an all-star five times and named to four All-NBA teams. He was born to score and finished his career with a 24-point per-game average.
Alonzo Mourning
We all fondly remember Alonzo Mourning as one of the best defensive-minded centers of the 1990s. In 2000, he was diagnosed with a rare kidney disease (focal segmental glomerulosclerosis), which sidelined him at the peak of his NBA career.
He missed the entire 2002-2003 season and was weighing options on how to treat his condition. After appearing for 12 games with the Nets in 2003, Mourning decided to retire due to his ongoing kidney disease. At this point, he wasn’t even thinking about returning to the NBA; he just wanted to prolong his life.
In late 2003, he received a kidney transplant from a distant cousin and miraculously returned to the NBA in 2004. He won a championship as a member of the Miami Heat in 2006 and played for them until his retirement in 2008.
Tony Snell
Snell may not have been an active NBA player by the time he discovered he had autism spectrum disorder, but he played nine solid years in the league without ever knowing he had it.
His diagnosis came to light when he had his son checked for ASD at 18 months. After his son’s test came back positive, Snell decided to get himself checked for it, and the result answered nearly all of the lingering doubts he had deep inside before.
He had ASD and played basketball at the highest level for nine years. That’s an amazing feat, if you’d ask me.
LaMarcus Aldridge
Aldridge may have Wolff-Parkinson-White-syndrome, a serious heart disease that causes rapid or irregular heartbeats, but the condition did not stop him from being selected as a seven-time all-star and a member of five All-NBA teams during his stellar 16-year career.
The 6-foot-11 big man from Dallas, Texas, had two non-open-heart procedures in 2007 and 2011 to treat it, but he only missed a few games because of it.
After experiencing an irregular heartbeat as a member of the Nets, Aldridge retired for the first time in April 2021. Still itching to play, he sought the help of medical professionals and eventually got cleared to resume basketball activities for the 2021-2022 NBA season.
Aldridge went on to play an additional 47 games for the Nets from 2021 to 2022 before retiring for good.
Randy Foye
Randy Foye has a rare medical issue called situs inversus. You might wonder what that is. In Foye’s condition, all of his major internal organs are located on the opposite side of his body compared to the typical arrangement for most people. This only occurs in one in every 10,000 births.
Thankfully, this rare condition isn’t life-threatening, and it poses no threat to anybody who has it, including Foye. He just had his internal organs on the other side of the body, that’s all.
Foye went on to play 11 years in the league and averaged 10-plus points per game in seven seasons.
