When the Heat selected Kasparas Jakucionis with the 20th overall pick in the 2025 draft, it was anything but business as usual for general manager Andy Elisburg, writes Ira Winderman for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
Elisburg made the call with the team’s official selection, as he has for years. However, this time, he was doing it from what Winderman describes as a high-tech wheelchair, due to an infection that had sapped him of his ability to do much of anything over the previous months.
“When I was done giving the pick, I was able to reach over and hang up the phone,” Elisburg says. “And the people in the back, all the therapists, and all the doctors were so excited, ‘He’s using his core! He’s using his core!’ Because, for me, I hadn’t had the ability.”
Winderman writes that the infection began late in the 2024/25 season. Elisburg had started feeling more exhausted than usual, but it wasn’t until he woke up one day following the season’s end with a left leg that wouldn’t work that he began to really worry.
“I was a whole lot sicker than I realized I was,” he said. “That’s where they discovered I had an infection throughout my body — in my knee, in my back. My kidney numbers, my liver numbers, everything was up and elevated. There were people who were not quite sure I was going to come out of that.”
With his kidneys at near dialysis levels, a partial amputation of Elisburg’s foot was required, as well as a handful of other surgeries over the following days, some of which strained his ability to keep his focus on his recovery, instead of the team.
“One of my procedures was happening the day of the lottery and got delayed and kept being delayed. And so it wound up happening during the lottery,” he said. “So I get out of the operating room, I get to the recovery room that I’m awake, alert enough to bring my friends in to see me, and my first question is, ‘So who won the lottery?’”
The surgeries were followed by grueling rehab sessions, which he is still undergoing, and which have recently yielded the ability to take steps through the use of parallel bars. Through it all, though, Elisburg has never lost his keen eye and hunger to solve whatever pressing needs the team might have.
“It was hard for me to sit in a hospital bed and sleep or watch TV. And after a while, I said, ‘I’ve got to get something going.’ I started making some phone calls, started talking about the draft and trades and things of that nature,” said Elisburg. “When I would talk to (Heat president) Pat (Riley) and (CEO) Nick (Arison), I’d say, ‘Hey, I’ve got some information.’ Initially, it was, ‘You worry about you.’ I was like, ‘I need to do this. I need something to get my mind going.’ And it went to now we started to have regularly scheduled meetings.”
Elisburg is now back in his office, trying to get back into the full swing of the job. He says he’s doing around 80% of his usual September workload. While the team leadership has constantly stressed the need to take care of himself first and foremost, the longtime Heat GM is just grateful that he’s on the road to recovery and can still do what he does best professionally.
“I’m looking forward to the season and lucky that I do something that I have such a passion for and still am able to do it,” he said.