Despite being named Florida Mr. Basketball in 1990, Clifford Rozier had an unspectacular NBA career. The former first-round pick by the Golden State Warriors' have been mired with injuries, appearing in just 173 games throughout his short four-season NBA stint, and was already out of the league at just the age of 25.

Sadly, according to the Associated Press, the 6-foot-11 center passed away last Friday after suffering a heart attack – almost twenty years since leaving his last team.

Rozier's former high school coach Bob Carroll, reminisced about his former protege in a Herald Tribune story.

“He made my job a lot easier, that’s for sure. Everybody knows how good of a basketball player he was, but he was a good student, and I never had any trouble with him in school. I don’t think he ever got sent to the dean’s office. He was a really good kid.”

The 45-year-old, who last played for the Minnesota Timberwolves during the 1997-98 season, is just one of the many pro cagers to lose their lives to heart disease – an ailment that the NBA has been closely monitoring after the untimely deaths of players such as Jason Collier and Sean Rooks, in addition to the string of 2015 casualties comprised of NBA Hall of Famers including Moses Malone and Darryl Dawkins. Also, a 2018 study by the Journal of the American Medical Association revealed that 15% of the 519 NBA athletes tested had abnormal results.

The NBA has since implemented heavy modifications to pregame tests that now includes extensive cardiac testing and application of advances in medical technology to prevent (or predict) future occurrences of heart-related ailments among their athletes.