Miami Heat icon Dwyane Wade’s statue finally has a good head on its shoulders.

Two years after the Heat unveiled an 8-foot bronze statue of Wade on the front steps of Kaseya Center in October 2024, the Heat announced Friday that it has made a change to the statue in the wake of outside criticism that the face did not resemble Wade.

While most of the statue that immortalized Wade’s “This is my house” game-winner on March 9, 2009 during his sixth NBA season remains the same, the head of the statue was replaced to better resemble Wade’s face. The Heat reached out to the original sculptors, Omri Amrany and Oscar León of Rotblatt Amrany Studio, more than a year ago to initiate the change to the first statue to go up at its home arena in the franchise’s 39 seasons.

The new head of Wade’s statue was created in Chicago and was installed over a two-day period on Tuesday and Wednesday this week. Work was then done to make sure Wade’s new head matched the color of the rest of the statue that has been outside of Kaseya Center for the last two years.

“After seeing the work at full scale and in its permanent environment, we identified opportunities to strengthen the portrait,” Amrany and León said in a statement about why the change was made. “We decided that the importance of Dwyane warranted making those refinements rather than accepting something we believed could be improved.”

Among the other statues that Rotblatt Amrany Studio is responsible for are “Michael Jordan Spirit” in Chicago; and the Pat Riley statue, the Kobe Bryant “Black Mamba” statue and the “Kobe and Gianna Bryant Memorial Statue” in Los Angeles.

“Once the work could be evaluated in its permanent setting, we saw an opportunity to further capture Dwyane’s likeness and presence,” Amrany and León also said in a statement. “We felt strongly that making that investment was the right thing to do.”

The outside criticism was loud when Wade’s statue was unveiled to the public two years ago.

“There’s never been a worse sports statue ever,” The Ringer’s Bill Simmons said.

“It’s a great honor, but they got to take that thing down,” “Inside the NBA” studio analyst and Basketball Hall of Famer Charles Barkley said. “If you made an ugly statue that’s what it would look like. That thing is awful.”

But Wade defended his statue against the outside criticism in the days after it was unveiled.

“When sitting down with the Miami Heat and myself, what we wanted to do is we wanted to capture a moment that represented the organization, represented myself and represented the city,” Wade said in October 2024. “I felt like we captured that moment in an artistic form in an artistic way. If I wanted it to look like me, I would just stand outside the arena and y’all would take photos. It don’t need to look like me. It’s an artistic version of a moment that happened that we’re trying to cement.

“Every time they create something, someone has to come out and say something about their creation that can’t do what they do. I know what that feels like because I was a former athlete, who people talked about me a lot but they couldn’t do what I do. So you learn how to just laugh, look at it, learn from it, move on, whatever. So we good, we good.”

Wade, 44, is widely considered to be the greatest player in Heat history.

Drafted by Miami with the fifth overall pick in 2003, Wade is the Heat’s all-time leader in categories like points, games played, minutes played, assists and steals and is considered one of the top shooting guards in NBA history. Among his most impressive accomplishments: three championships with the Heat (2006, 2012, 2013), a Finals MVP award in 2006 and an NBA scoring title in the 2008-09 season.

Wade’s NBA playing career lasted 16 seasons and included 13 All-Star Game selections, spending the first 13 seasons of his career with the Heat before briefly leaving amid a contract dispute to spend the 2016-17 season with the Chicago Bulls and part of the 2017-18 season with the Cleveland Cavaliers. But Wade was traded back to the Heat midway through the 2017-18 season to end his career in Miami, entering retirement at the end of the 2018-19 season before being inducted into the Basketball of Fame as part of the 2023 class.