Winning formula
Dolphin playbook won’t work for Heat.
Unless they redefine how winners are made in the NBA, they won’t be a contending team.
In the end, the Heat did what the Dolphins did. They paid their own. They stuck with status quo. They brought back players rather than sign a break-the-bank outsider in away that offered a changed business plan.
So why is the Dolphins plan something to nod along with?
And why is the Heat’s decisions a larger gamble?
The answer is the difference between football and basketball. It’s the story of two sports. And that difference revolves around a simple issue: What matters more, if you want to build a contending team— how good your best players are, or howgood your worst players are?
Basketball is a game where the best players matter most. It’s getting LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. You can find role players around them. The Heat did so for four years, reaching the NBA Finals in each of them and winning two titles. Players, in fact, flocked to them for the chance of greatness.
Football is a game where theworst players can completely negate the strengths of the best players. Sure, superstars matter. But defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh and end Cameron Wake can only do so much if players around them aren’t very good. That was the story of the Dolphins defense last year.
There are a lot of sidebars and footnotes that go along with these best-player or
worst-player statements, of course. But the prime idea can be understood by looking at the working philosophies of the top minds in basketball and football.
Heat president Pat Riley has won with different teams and in different eras. He covets “whales.” The big names. The best talent available. That’s why Riley went so strongly in the past week after free-agent forward Gordon Hayward, who signed instead with Boston.
It’s not that Riley disliked the players he effectively re-signed with that Hayward money— James Johnson and Dion Waiters. They’re good players. They led the Heat’s second-half surge last season. Theywere the best fall-back plan.
But Riley understands you’re only as good as your best players in basketball— and Hayward is better. Riley is about championships, you see, and the only half the roster really matters in the playoffs for contending NBA teams. And the top few matter exponentially more. Hayward would have been in that group.
Football is different. New-England Patriots coach Bill Belichick’s not-so-secret secret over his dynastic run this millennium is he values every roster spot and finds players that fit his system. Belichick couldn’t win without quarterback Tom Brady, of course.
But would New England have won this past Super Bowl without third-string running back James White’s three touchdowns? Or its previous Super Bowl without undrafted rookie cornerback Malcolm Butler’s goal-line interception?
These were players at the bottom of the roster earlier in the season. In basketball, Udonis Haslem occupies the final spot on the Heat roster. Everyone loves him. But it tells of the roster spot that his value is essentially as a coach now, not as a player.
The Dolphins made a philosophical change from chasing whales this off-season to one more in line with the Patriots. They paid their own. They gave big deals to the likes of Reshad Jones, Kenny Stills, Kiko Alonso and Wake. They valued successful players in their system. And, in football, the system matters.
“Wewant our guys to playwell sowe pay them and keep them here,” Dolphins coach Adam Gase said this spring.
In basketball, the top three players are the system. The Heat went for Hayward. They settled for bringing back Johnson and Waiters and buying a medium-priced free agent in Kelly Olynyk (the Dolphins, for that matter, got medium-priced free agents like Lawrence Timmons and Nate Allen).
The Heat will be a fun team towatch. They’ll be awell-run team as always. But unless they redefine how winners aremade in the NBA, they won’t be a contending team. Thatwas decided in part when Hayward chose Boston.