Charles Barkley was in savage mode while reacting to Dwyane Wade’s new Miami Heat statue the team unveiled in front of Kaseya Center on Sunday.
During TNT’s Tip-Off show on Tuesday night, Barkley called Wade’s bronze statue — that many suggested online looks nothing like him — “ugly” and awful,” and said the Heat should remove it.
“It’s a great honor, but they gotta take that thing down,” Barkley said.
Kenny Smith yelled “no!” and explained that Wade’s face on the statue — a rendition of his celebratory moment when he hit a buzzer-beater shot to beat the Bulls in double overtime in 2009 — was just him being animated.
“Not animated,” Barkley replied. “If you made an ugly statue that’s what it would look like. That thing is awful.”
Smith disagreed, while co-hosts Ernie Johnson and Shaquille O’Neal laughed.
“It’s not awful. Look, he’s making an animated face,” Smith said. “That’s a moment.”
Barkley added, “That was after he saw the statue right there. That’s the face he made after [he saw it].”
He took one more jab at Wade’s statue after some banter between the “Inside the NBA” stars.
“Hey, Kenny, that statue was so bad they had to put all his stats behind it so you know who it was,” he said.
That’s when Smith shouted out the sculptors who made the bronze statue, Omri Amrany and Oscar León of Rotblatt Amrany Studio.
Wade responded after glaring reactions from fans saying the the statue looked nothing like the Heat legend.
“If I wanted it to look like me, I’d just stand outside the arena and y’all can take photos,” Wade said Monday. “It don’t need to look like me. It’s the artistic version of a moment that happened that we’re trying to cement.”
