Doctor MJ wrote:I wanted to write a short love letter to Wade after arguing against him so much.
I admire Wade as a player and team leader immensely.
I remember Wade's rookie season where he really came on as the year went along. I never seriously questioned whether he should rank ahead of the anointed LeBron/Melo during the season, but it would not be long before I came to the conclusion that Wade was the best player from the legendary 2003 draft through their first 3 NBA season.
The 2004 Olympics are now remember primarily for the US team's failure and rightly so, but one of the most interesting aspects of these national teams is seeing how the expected player ranking on the roster transforms.
The all-time thing here is the dirty secret that Charles Barkley was the best player on the Dream Team, the greatest team ever assembled, rather than Jordan.
I also remember one year where OJ Mayo got cut from the team while Eric Gordan was kept. That was a shock. To that point Mayo was still seen as the better player both in the present and for the future. When he got cut, I remember there being a lot of denial on RealGM. Either it was a mistake, or there was something very strange going on. As we look back it's just clear that Mayo really was never very good.
In 2004 the most noteworthy thing was that Wade got more run than LeBron or Melo, and I've really never seen reason to see that a mistake. (Basing the team offense around Iverson & Marbury on the other hand, HUGE mistake.)
The following year, '04-05, Shaq came to the Heat and the team became a contender. And while Wade had clearly emerged as the lead perimeter player on the team, we all wrote Wade off to some degree because of Shaq. There was a feeling that Shaq's presence was just making guards look like superstars wherever he went as nobody could be that lucky to keep having unexpected guard superstars as teammates, right? Turns out, nope, Shaq was getting incredibly lucky the whole time. Penny, Kobe, Wade - all of them were absolutely legit.
And we really realized that in the 2005 playoffs where Wade carried the team in Shaq's absence. I remember a debate at the time about who the best player in the playoffs was. Most agreed it was between Nash & Wade, which was not what any of us expected going in. I'll own up to giving my unofficial MVP vote to Shaq, rather than Nash, despite defending Nash to the heavens even at the time. I believed in Nash, but I also swallowed the narrative that Shaq was making Wade.
'05-06 comes around and the Heat are now Wade's team, and of course he delivers a championships cementing his legacy for the ages. I voted for Wade for POY in that season back when we did it, and I don't have cause to regret it. That year was always incredibly hard to come up with good rankings and other guys had arguments, but Wade certainly deserved to be in the mix.
The thing that fascinated me at the time about Wade was just how minimalist his game was. In terms of scoring, he was on the opposite end of the spectrum from Kobe. Kobe could hit any kind of shot and specialized in hitting harder shots than anyone else with virtuoso skill. Wade drove to the hoop and either shot or drew a foul, seemingly inevitably ending up with his body on the ground. Wade couldn't do all the things Kobe did, but he had this one thing, and he could do it over and over and over again. Frankly it seemed a lot smarter to me at the time!
Of course, when he started having injury issues, it was hard to see this as anything other than inevitable. I was always grateful that he emerged again a couple years later back roughly to his old self.
I was impressed that he delivered LeBron to Miami. Yes LeBron does what he wants, yes Riles was part of it, yes South Beach was part of it, but fundamentally it was Wade's stature that brought the superteam to Miami.
I was also impressed with the way he took a backseat to LeBron but was ready to take back over when LeBron struggled.
As we look back on the Heatle era, while I'll say things critical due to the fact that they never truly emerged as a "best possible basketball team", they were very successful, and there was a buy-in to culture that started with Wade, which has managed to stick around ever since then. Others deserve credit for this too of course, but I thought it was telling Jimmy Butler talking about the sense of mentorship and empowerment he got from Wade. Very few players continue to have such a prominent place in a franchise after their time as a player is over, but Wade is one of that select few.
