When 35-year-old LaMarcus Aldridge announced his retirement from the NBA on Thursday, what kind of a player was he to you?

He was drafted by the Chicago Bulls with the second overall pick in 2006 and then traded to the Portland Trail Blazers. He has played 1,029 regular season games in 15 seasons, averaging 19.4 points and 8.2 rebounds. He has played 72 playoff games, never appeared in the NBA Finals and reached the Conference Finals once. Aldridge is also seven-time All-Star, two-time All-NBA Second Team member and three-time Third-Team member.

In his announcement, Aldridge said he was dealing with "irregular heartbeat" in the game against the Los Angeles Lakers on April 10. In fact, that was not the first time for him to suffer from similar problems. He was diagnosed with Wolff–Parkinson–White syndrome, a heart ailment, in his rookie season missed all last eight games of the 2006-07 campaign.

Before the 2011-12 season began, Aldridge underwent surgery to correct complications associated with his heart condition.

When he said, "what I felt with my heart that night was still one of the scariest things I've experienced," you know he meant every word he said.

Moreover, big men in the NBA have usually been more vulnerable to heart problems. Darryl "Chocolate Thunder" Dawkins died of a heart attack in 2015. Moses Malone, one of the most dominant centers in NBA history, died of a heart attack in hypertensive and atherosclerotic heart disease in the same year. Wilt "The Big Dipper" Chamberlain could still run marathons in 1996 but died of congestive heart failure three years later.

There are only a few players entering the league in the same year with Aldridge and still playing: Paul Millsap, Rajon Rondo, Kyle Lowry, J.J. Reddick, Rudy Gay and P.J. Tucker. Aldridge has played longer than all of them.

As some may recall, Brandon Roy was also drafted in 2006, with the No. 6 pick.

Back then, acquiring Aldridge and Roy was a very successful step of Rip City's rebuilding plan and more seemingly so when they selected Greg Oden with the No. 1 pick in 2007. The world was almost convinced that the future belongs to Portland because of the three talented young men. The three played 62 games together and won 50 of them.

Of course, Aldridge was never the leader of the team – that's Roy's role, and, in the future, maybe Oden's.

Everyone knows what happened in the following years. Oden was destroyed by injuries. So was Roy. Therefore, after five seasons, Aldridge became the leader of the Trail Blazers. He's totally capable of playing that role. From the 2007-08 season, Aldridge was already one of the top 5 scorers in the low block – those who did better than him in that area were Dight Howard, Al Jefferson, Tim Duncan and Yao Ming.

In 2012, Aldridge was named for the All-Star for the first time in his career. Then in that summer, the team drafted another guard with the No. 6 pick, 22-year-old Damian Lillard from Weber State University.

It did not take the Trail Blazers long to decide that the new kid would be the team's leader. That's why during the three years they played together at Moda Center (Rose Garden), there have always been rumors that Aldridge and Lillard did not like each other.

The truth is, having seen what happened to Roy and Oden, Aldridge really appreciated Lillard's explosive performance in his rookie season. He wanted to give Lillard some advice sometimes, but Aldridge has never been a talkative guy in his life, and he did not know how to talk to Lillard in a proper way. On Lillard's side, he thought Aldridge, who had already played six seasons in the NBA back then, would cover him with his feathers like many senior big men in the league. Both regretted such lack of communication after Aldridge left.

Fortunately, the two worked well with each other on the court. Aldridge reached his career highs in average points in 2014 (23.2) and 2015 (23.4). Though Lillard was the one who got into most headlines, Aldridge was always there, ready to help the team. For example, he scored 89 points in the first two games of the first-round playoffs against the Houston Rockets in 2014.

In the 2015 summer, free-agent Aldridge decided to join the San Antonio Spurs. Back then, the team still had Duncan, Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili, and Kawhi Leonard. If Aldridge wanted to win a ring, no place seemed better than the Spurs.

Nonetheless, the Spurs met the Oklahoma City Thunder in the Western Conference Semifinals and probably the best form of Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook playing together. The Spurs lost the series 4-2, but Aldridge dropped 38 points at 78.3 percent in Game 1 and 41 points at 71.4 percent.

Duncan retired that summer, and the Spurs decided to make Leonard their new leader, assuming that Aldridge would agree like he always did. Coach Gregg Popovich gave Aldridge a lot of complicated and petty work on the floor.

Then Aldridge missed the All-Star for the first time in six years. In 2017 summer, he found Popovich and said: "I want to be traded." Simple as that, but scary enough to give the Spurs a heart attack. That's when Popovich realized in what an unfair way Aldridge has been treated. After a lot of discussions, the two sides talked things out. Aldridge played probably the best two seasons of his career at 33 and 34 years old. He made it back to the All-Star; he scored 697 and 727 points respectively in the low block; in January 2019, Aldridge blew STEVEN Adams and Jerami Grant to five and six fouls while scoring career-high 56 points to lead the Spurs to beat the Thunder.

Aldridge's game could not be any far from modern style. 71.6 percent of his shooting attempts happened in the middle range, and his field goal rate is 42.9 percent. It's good, but not good enough to make a difference like Kevin Durant, Dirk Nowitzki or Michael Jordan. Giving enough opportunities, Aldridge could be productive, just not that efficient.

But not everything is about efficiency. Aldridge's hang shot, spin moves, hook shot, fadeaway … all of them are classical arts that used to dominate this league for a long time. He had the chance to chase both efficiency and a ring in the Brooklyn Nets, but heart problem caught him at last.

"I've made the difficult decision to retire from the NBA. For 15 years, I've put basketball first, and now, it is time to put my health and family first," wrote Aldridge.

Life is more than basketball.