Shareef Abdur-Rahim

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Julius Shareef Abdur-Rahim (born December 11, 1976 in Marietta, Georgia) is an American professional basketball player. He currently is a member of the Sacramento Kings of the NBA.

Rahim played basketball at Wheeler High School in Marietta where he was named as "Mr. Basketball" in back-to-back seasons, leading the school to a state title as a junior in 1994 (his siblings played at Wheeler too and also won several state championships). He later attended college at the University of California, Berkeley for one year, after which he was selected by the NBA by the Vancouver Grizzlies with the 3rd pick in the 1996 NBA Draft.

He made an immediate impact on the Grizzlies, becoming their leading scorer, and was clearly the best player on an otherwise dismal team. In 2001, he was traded to the Atlanta Hawks where he remained the premier player for several years. He was selected to the NBA All-Star team in 2002. Abdur-Rahim was traded to the Portland Trail Blazers on February 9, 2004, along with Theo Ratliff and Dan Dickau, in exchange for Rasheed Wallace and Wesley Person. He played 1½ seasons in Portland before becoming a free agent at the end of the 2004-2005 season.

During the 2005 off-season he was traded via a sign and trade agreement (in principle) to the New Jersey Nets, but on August 4, the press conference planned to announce his arrival was postponed, and it was revealed he had failed a required physical on account of scar tissue found in his knee. The trade was put on hold, pending a second opinion from other medical sources. On August 7 Abdur-Rahim was quoted as saying "I don't feel I want to be a Net" [1]. He felt the knee was a non issue and claimed he never missed a game in his entire career because of the knee injury. Two days later, it was announced New Jersey had decided to rescind the trade.

On August 12, Abdur-Rahim signed a free agent contract with the Sacramento Kings.

He is Muslim, and his father is an imam.

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The Curse

The Curse of Shareef Abdur-Rahim was a recent phenomenon in basketball folklore, which sought to explain why Shareef Abdur-Rahim, despite over nine seasons of excellent NBA production, had never participated on a team which qualified for the NBA playoffs until the 2005-06 NBA season , despite playing on three different teams in his first nine seasons in the league. Abdur-Rahim has played the second most career NBA games without a playoff appearance(744), surpassed only by Tom Van Arsdale's NBA-record 929 games without making the playoffs.

For Abdur-Rahim's first seven seasons in the NBA, he played for two rather mediocre squads, the Vancouver Grizzlies (now the Memphis Grizzlies) and the Atlanta Hawks. However, many anticipated that Abdur-Rahim would finally taste playoff success in 2004, when he (along with Theo Ratliff and Dan Dickau) was traded to the Portland Trail Blazers in exchange for Rasheed Wallace and Wesley Person. At the time, the Trail Blazers had a streak of 21 straight appearances in the NBA playoffs going. However, the Blazers failed to qualify for the playoffs that year, a fact which several NBA commentators (jokingly) attributed to Abdur-Rahim.

Abdur-Rahim played one additional season in Portland, before signing a free-agent contract with the Sacramento Kings, a team with a seven-year playoff streak going. The Kings beat the New Orleans Hornets on April 17 2006, with a score of 96-79, giving them a record of 43-38 with just one game left. The win clinched them a playoff spot, ending "The Curse."

Unlike other infamous sporting curses (or alleged curses), such as the curse of the Bambino, no particular reason or offense (committed by Abdur-Rahim or anyone else) was given for the curse — nor was a curse ever pronounced by any individual. Abdur-Rahim is not considered a selfish player or as a divisive presence in the locker-room, and is widely regarded as one of the classier individuals in the NBA. Many doubted the existence of a curse at all, believing that Abdur-Rahim simply had been unfortunate to play on a longer-than-average run of lackluster teams (including two former playoff teams who were in the midst of rebuilding, when Abdur-Rahim happened to join their rosters).

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