In the seeming small-market versus big-market conflict of the NBA lockout, one of the concerns has been what happened last summer. Everyone in the league seemed blindsided when word leaked out that LeBron James was taking his talent to South Beach.
Small-market owners already claiming loss and hardship suddenly saw their ability to keep and maintain their star players greatly diminish. if the hometown Cavaliers could not keep James AND he took less than the maximum salary to join his buddies in warm-weathered Miami, what chance do they have?
A harder salary cap will restrict player movement (theoretically) and give teams a better chance of keeping their stars. Unless you are a team with multiple high-priced stars like the Heat.
Miami fans surely are curious what will happen if a stricter salary cap forces Mickey Arison and Pat Riley to make the impossible decision — LeBron James or Dwyane Wade? Ira Winderman of the (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.) Sun Sentinel certainly wondered that as he did his offseason evaluations of the Heat’s players and tried to figure out which players the team should keep or “kick” whenever the offseason transaction period should begin.
The James/Wade/Bosh experiment will not end after two years. But even with the relatively murky picture labor picture and no idea what the actual rules of free agency and player acquisition might look like, it is reasonably foreseeable to see the Heat one day having to make the decision between Wade and James.
At any point during the life of these contracts, Wade and James will be two of the top five players in the league. It only makes that decision even harder.
“No one is saying to break up the Big Three, but if the new collective-bargaining agreement calls for a lower, hard cap, then tough decisions might have to be made,” Winderman writes. “But Wade is where it all started for the Heat’s revival and thus far he has shown to continue to be the face of the franchise. He arguably still stands as the team’s best player, at least in clutch situations.
“But if the cap does grow restrictive, there will have to be some thought about whether the games of Wade and James are redundant. Not immediately, but certainly if the Heat come up shy of a title again, the merits of the overlap would have to be weighed. That said, it would be odd to have Bosh and James remain and see Wade moved.”
Remember, Wade is the only one of the three who has a ring and decided to stay with the team that drafted him in that free agency (in fact, he is the only player in the top five of the 2004 Draft still with his original team, weird). And Wade said he gets along fine with James and plays well with him so the redundancy of talent argument does not necessarily hold… at least, that is what he is telling the world.
Winderman seems to think James would have more trade value and that is the rationale he is going with in picking to keep Wade over James. You can read the comments on the Sun Sentinel’s Web site attached to both the James and Wade write ups and see Heat fans are pretty divided too.
Talk about a tough decision… should the salary cap force Miami to make it.
Photo via DayLife.com.
