Tag: Dwyane Wade

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The Forgotten NBA Free Agent

Photo Credit: Ronald Martinez/Getty Images

Much has been made about Kevin Durant’s free agency decision, and rightfully so.  He’s the best available player in the league (aside from LeBron James, but he’s staying put) and his choice could significantly shift the NBA’s balance of power.

But there is one free agent who isn’t attracting nearly as much attention, and for obvious reasons: Dwyane Wade.

Wade is 34 years old, the same age Michael Jordan was when he commenced his second final season in 1997.  He is admittedly not what he once was, which was one of the most dynamic, enjoyable, and productive players in a league that was and is chock-full of them.  Wade’s injury-precipitated decline almost exactly coincided with James’ realization of his dream of winning an NBA championship, one he fulfilled in 2012 with a five-game triumph over Durant’s Thunder.  Now, all three are free agents.

And, continuing with the Wade/Durant irony, who else remembers this Gatorade commercial?  In it, Durant’s goes up for a dunk attempt but is thwarted by a younger, more athletic Wade.  You can see the rest for yourself:

Pretty sick, huh?  The one-minute spot ends with KD dunking on Wade and Dwyane waking up from his nightmare to start the process Durant just finished.  Pretty fitting.

Just like with Durant, it was never thought that Wade could possibly leave Miami.  However, he’s in serious talks with other teams, such as the Bucks and Nuggets, to leave the Heat behind. While he will probably stay in Miami like he has for the first 13 years of his career, there is a legitimate possibility that he could leave.

Leaving Miami for Denver or Milwaukee could not possibly be a basketball decision; rather, it would be a decision based on the Heat organization’s treatment of him even as he has taken repeated pay cuts to help the team attract free agents.  Team president Pat Riley prioritized Durant and Hassan Whiteside before Wade, and he was right to do so.  Both are younger and have more to give at this stage of their careers, and while Wade may feel disrespected by the team’s priorities, it’s hard to fault the Heat for thinking like they did.

But what does Wade have left in the tank for whichever team signs him?  And what can those teams expect from a player so clearly entering the twilight of his career?

For one thing, the man they call Flash was significantly healthier last season.  After missing 48 games in the prior two seasons, he appeared in all but eight games last year.  Granted, his production is continually declining; his field goal percentage (45.6%) was the lowest of his career and he only averaged 19 points per game.  However, his 74 games were the most he played in since 2010-11, when he was regarded as a legitimate sidekick to James instead of his second fiddle.

Another consideration for Wade is lengthening his career.  After repeated knee injuries over the past few seasons, he’s probably looking for a situation where he may not have to do quite as much to carry his new team.  While that situation is probably in South Beach, consider this: Wade’s usage rate (31.6%) ranked fifth in the NBA last season.  Even worse, three of the four players ahead of him in that category (DeMarcus Cousins, Stephen Curry, James Harden) are all decidedly younger and better able to handle the rigors of an 82-game schedule.  Asking less of Wade over the course of a full season would help him stay fresh and healthy for a potential playoff run.

But is there an actual fit in either Denver or Milwaukee?  In Milwaukee, the answer is no, if only for logistical reasons.  As the Bucks are currently constituted, they do not have the cap room to bring in Wade on a max contract or something similar to it.  However, if the team decides that it wants to trade Greg Monroe, which is widely believed to be a strong possibility, it would then have enough cap room to pay Wade.

In Denver, a move to acquire Wade would be far more questionable.  The Nuggets have several young players in their backcourt, including Emmanuel Mudiay and 2016 7th overall pick Jamal Murray.  Signing Wade may very well mean getting rid of one or both of those players for the dual purpose of creating cap room and clearing out an already crowded backcourt.

There’s this angle, too: wouldn’t it be better for Denver and coach Mike Malone to let the team’s younger players develop? Parting with Murray or Mudiay would deny them of this opportunity, one that may not exist elsewhere.  We should point out that Mudiay was really, really bad last year (9.9 PER). Nevertheless, he and Murray do have the opportunity to develop into solid players and core pieces of Denver’s future.

The best choice for Wade and his future, though, is clearly to stay in Miami.  He has built an identity there and the Heat are by far the best team pursuing him.  While he is understandably upset that Riley prioritized Whiteside and Durant over him, wouldn’t you do the same?  Eventually, Wade should realize that Riley did what was best for the Heat organization, even if that came at the expense of the team’s most recognizable figure.

And Wade has still shown that he can be a very good player. He’s far removed from the days of driving to the basket with reckless abandon, often sacrificing his body to get baskets.  This undoubtedly caught up with him and he’s definitely lost a step since that time in his career.  But he has a track record of coming up big when it counts; after all, he singlehandedly carried Miami to its first NBA title in 2006.

Dwyane Wade is still a very good player, maybe the second best on the open market right now.  But he, like everyone else, has been enveloped in the Durant sweepstakes.

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Why Athletes Don’t Trust the Media

Photo Credit: AP Images
Photo Credit: AP Images

The Golden State Warriors defeated the Houston Rockets 121-94 on Sunday to take a 3-1 lead in their first-round series.  To many in the city of Houston, though, the game was an afterthought.

Ravaging floods have recently affected the city, killing at least eight and forcing over 1,000 to leave their homes.  The rainfall is a serious matter as it has caused over $5 billion in property damage across the city.  Therefore, you can understand why Houstonians aren’t exactly worried about their Rockets right now.

But that didn’t stop a reporter from asking Draymond Green a question about the parallels between the flood and the Warriors’ road wins in the city in each of the past two playoffs.  Instead of deflecting this ridiculous inquiry, Green took the time to wonderfully excoriate whoever this “reporter” is:

The question was easily the dumbest I’ve ever heard.  Trying to create similarities between the team’s 21 threes and a life-threatening natural disaster is never a good way to go about your business as a so-called “journalist”.  Yes, you’re there to ask questions and get more than just cliched responses out of the players, but you’re also supposed to make informed, relevant, pointed inquiries.  That question had none of those qualities.

And yet, upon hearing the tirade, I had a different thought: would it have been better for Green to just say “next question” and move on? Did Green’s destruction of the reporter actually shift attention away from the question and toward the player ranting about it?

We’ve seen reporters ask stupid questions before, especially in the NBA.  During the 2014 NBA Finals, local reporter Bobby Ramos made a name for himself for all the wrong reasons.  After the Spurs’ 111-92 defeat of the Heat in Game 3, Ramos got his chance to question LeBron James and Dwyane Wade.  This is what he asked in his 15 seconds of fame:

I have no idea what Ramos was trying to accomplish by way of that question.  Translated, this is what he asked: “Is the problem that you’re not scoring enough or that you’re giving up too many points?” Basically, it sounded like Ramos wanted to know if it was important for one team to score more points than the other.  In my brief experience with the game of basketball, it is.  But that’s just my perspective.

It was a question that James and Wade wasted little time with.  They both chuckled and Wade answered that the team was down 2-1 and that was the big problem.  Really, huh?  I’m sure that’s a piece of information that fans would not have previously known.

That wasn’t all the press conference fireworks for that series, however.  Before game 4, Spurs coach Gregg Popovich sat down at the podium and fielded this bizarre query from another Miami-area reporter:

While Popovich gets criticized sometimes (and rightfully so) for his excessive brevity with reporters, he did nothing wrong by shooting down this question.  The team was coming off one of the most dominant performances in NBA Finals history in game 3; a repeat of that level of play would assuredly be good enough to win game 4.  So why on Earth would the team change anything?  What is there to change?  Again, this is an example of a question that was not thought out in advance, one that ended with a verbal smackdown that ended faster than you could say “five championships”.

But which response is better: the ignorance of the question or the flaming of the reporter who asked it?  The answer depends on the situation.

For example, Green was asked a question about flooding, a life-threatening situation.  He and the Warriors were also coming off a game in which they lost soon-to-be-MVP Stephen Curry to a knee injury; Curry will miss at least two weeks with an MCL sprain.  That loss, combined with the stupidity of the question asked, created a perfect storm for Draymond to react the way he did.

On the other hand, Popovich, Wade, and James were asked questions about the game itself.  Granted, they were absurd lines of questioning, but they had to do with the comparatively trivial subject of sports and nothing greater.  Because of this, it was easier for them to deflect the questions as nothing more than unprepared reporting.  However, it would have been understandable if they had reacted to the silly questioning like Jay-Z probably reacted to Lemonade; that is to say, not well.

There’s another side to the story, though, and that’s the side of the reporter.  Obviously, not all sports journalists ask questions so hollow and uninformed.  There are plenty of reporters who ask fair, challenging, tough questions that back interview subjects into corners.  For example, take this exchange that then-CNN personality Rachel Nichols had with Roger Goodell over a year ago:

There, Nichols asked a very relevant question: why does the NFL refer to their investigations as “independent” if they are still paying the “private investigators”?  The commissioner immediately got defensive with Nichols, saying that he didn’t agree with her assertion and even pointing out that she won’t be paying for the league’s investigations.   The exchange was a demonstration of excellent journalism and how a prepared, reasonable question could put one of the most powerful people in sports on his heels.

That being said, not enough of those informed questions (and people) comprise the sports media today.  Too many times, athletes are asked ignorant questions at press conferences, flip out on the reporters asking them, and are blamed by the partial media for doing so.  In reality, it isn’t their fault; they push themselves to their physical and mental limits each and every day.  To have second-rate journos interrogate them this way is, in some ways, a little insulting.

The relationship between athletes, coaches, and the media is an interesting one.  The players and coaches feel that they should be given more space while the media wants unfettered access into their lives.  Their relationship is lukewarm, at best.

And with questions like the one posed to Draymond Green last night, it’s hard to see it improving anytime soon.