by Marcel Mutoni / @marcel_mutoni
The sports world went crazy when LeBron James and Chris Bosh joined Dwyane Wade in Miami last July.
It was an unprecedented coup for the Heat’s front-office, but what was most remarkable about it, is that it was the players themselves who orchestrated much of the shocking move.
According to DWade, NBA fans — and most critically — executives shouldn’t be surprised if this has a snowball effect on other free agents.
After all, we’ve already seen hints from other stars around the NBA looking to make similar decisions.
ESPN has the quotes:
Love or hate the Miami Heat, Dwyane Wade knows that he and teammates LeBron James and Chris Bosh set a trend the rest of the NBA will follow for years. “Yes, we have,” Wade said. “I don’t know whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but more guys are going to look to team up and do things like that.”
“I don’t know. I wish I could pinpoint it,” he said. “Obviously, people don’t like change. And we changed things. We changed the way things were done. People don’t like that. It takes time to get used to it. Whenever you’re the first to do something, it’s not always the best thing. But eventually later on you get to see, it wasn’t that bad. You can look at a guy like Allen Iverson when he first came in the league, tattoos, braids, all these things, it wasn’t cool. It was cool on the outside, but in the NBA world it wasn’t cool. Now you see people around the world with tattoos, braids, no matter what profession you’re in, it’s OK. But he was one of the first ones, as an athlete, to do it. And you’ve seen that he got a lot of backlash, but now it’s a cool thing to do. Anybody can get braids now, anybody can get tattoos now, and it’s not as bad. When you’re the first one to do something, it’s always the worst, but eventually it comes around.”
Free agent supertars deciding to join forces, thereby creating super-teams is precisely the kind of thing NBA team owners want to curb going forward — the ability for players to take control of their own careers, and to dramatically alter the sport’s landscape in a single summer.
The folks holding the purse strings for teams, especially in smaller markets, will fight tooth and nail during this labor war to make sure Dwyane Wade’s prediction of a free agent trend starting never gets off the ground.
