Wally Szczerbiak

Lore & Background

Szczerbiak was born in Madrid, Spain, to Marilyn and Walt Szczerbiak, a former ABA player who helped lead Real Madrid to three FIBA European Champions Cup championships. He spent much of his childhood in Europe, learning fluent Spanish and Italian. After his father retired, the family moved to Long Island, New York, where Szczerbiak played high school basketball at Cold Spring Harbor High School. He averaged 36.6 points and 15.9 rebounds per game as a senior and won the Richard Sangler Award as Nassau County's outstanding boys' basketball player. Despite his statistics, he went unrecruited due to his school's small size. He committed to Miami University after a campus visit, over his father's wishes to wait. In college, he became a first-team All-American and MAC Player of the Year, leading the Redhawks to the Sweet 16 in 1999. He finished as Miami's second all-time leading scorer with 1,847 points and had his jersey (#32) retired in 2001.

In Their Own Story

The Target Center was deafeningly loud, the clock ticking down under ten seconds. Szczerbiak, clutching his knee brace with a grimace hidden beneath focus, caught the inbound pass at the top of the key. The defender jumped early, expecting a drive that would never come. With a smooth, practiced motion, he rose above the rim, releasing a fadeaway jumper that seemed to hang in the air forever before swishing through the net. The arena erupted, not just for the basket, but for the sheer willpower of a man who had been told his career was over years ago.

Reader's Guide

Szczerbiak was selected by the Minnesota Timberwolves with the sixth overall pick in the 1999 NBA draft. His best year was 2002, when he was a coaches' selection to the Western Conference All-Star team. He tied a Timberwolves franchise record of 44 points on April 13, 2003. He was traded to the Boston Celtics in January 2006, then to the Seattle SuperSonics in June 2007, and finally to the Cleveland Cavaliers in February 2008. He retired in 2009 after multiple knee surgeries. After retiring, he became a basketball analyst for CBS College Sports in 2009 and joined MSG Network as a Knicks analyst in 2012, a role he still holds as of 2026.

Did You Know?

• Szczerbiak is one of five basketball players whose jerseys have been retired by Miami University.
• He scored a career-high 43 points in a first-round NCAA tournament game against Washington in 1999.
• His father, Walt Szczerbiak, set a Spanish League single-game scoring record with 65 points while playing for Real Madrid.
• Szczerbiak is of Ukrainian origin; his grandparents met in a refugee camp in West Germany after World War II.
• He married Shannon Ward in 2000, and they have five children; the couple filed for divorce in 2020.