Wade’s Heat homecoming is an ode to joy
MIAMI – This said it all: Applause fell like confetti as Dwyane Wade moved off the Heat bench. Noise built with each step he took to the scorer’s table. And by the time he was announced over the loudspeaker in the first quarter …
“For the Heat …” ... everyone in American Airlines Arena stood and …
“…No.3!…” … the roar spread like fire in a cauldron. “… Dwyane …WA-A-ADE!” The game stopped momentarily. Heat players joined the applause. The crowd stayed on its feet, bringing thunder into the arena, everyone basking in the feeling of a headlined reunion.
It was then that Wade, in the center of love, looked up and gave the expression captured by the thousand camera clicks and live TV in the opening seconds of
his first game back with the Heat.
No smile. No wave to the crowd. All game face.
“I’m home,” his face said, and there’s business to be done — fun business, as he’d alluded to earlier in the day. But he’d come back home to play, to win, and with 5:19 left in the first quarter, the Heat trailed Milwaukee, 13-9.
In the first minute, Wade had a tip on defense, a rebound and a lob to Hassan Whiteside that resulted in a lay-in. Whiteside jogged back on defense with a lollipop smile on his face that was reflected across the arena.
Every play seemed to mean more than it mattered, every move more closely noted. A few minutes later, Wade hit a 3-point shot and the crowd was up and cheering again.
And so it started Friday night. Or restarted, really. Wade even sat at his old locker, the one he had for 13 years before moving to Chicago a season ago. He then moved to Cleveland to start this season. But …
“I always felt Miami was where his heart and mind was,” LeBron James was saying Friday in Cleveland.
The idea to bring him home formed a couple of weeks ago when Wade and Heat president Pat Riley hugged at the funeral of Wade’s longtime agent Henry Thomas. It gained traction with the dysfunction of Wade’s Cleveland team.
It came together Thursday hours before the NBA’s trade deadline. As Wade drove to work out in Cleveland with James, a text came from Wade’s agent, Leon Rose: “Call me 911.”
“I haven’t got a lot of ‘911 call me now,’ on the trade deadline throughout my career,’’ Wade said. “So I knew it was something.”
Meanwhile, on the Heat’s side, coach Erik Spoelstra was told before Thursday’s practice that Luke Babbitt, a former Heat player, was returning. And something might happen “with Dwyane,’’ Riley said.
“I stopped as I was walking out the door and said, ‘What? Dwyane who?’ ” Spoelstra said.
The trade was made just before Wade was supposed to have lunch with James. He went anyway, knowing that per Heat protocol, “I’ve got to go do the body-fat [measurement].”
He knows the drill. Riley made a couple of pointed references to Wade losing a few pounds. Is Wade hungrier to win, at 36, than he is to eat?
Pounds matter. So does age. If its impact isn’t always obvious on the court, it is off it. He wears prescription glasses now. Stylish glasses, for sure. But still.
“I’d been fighting it for a while,” he said.
Now it’s a new fight with familiar questions. Can he help this Heat season? Will he help them to the playoffs? Before all that, Wade had a question of his own about this first night.
“Is No. 3 available?” he asked a Heat official during his news conference, referring to his old jersey. The official nodded. “There you go.”
Fifteen minutes before tip-off, the Heat huddled up in what they call Championship Alley outside their locker room. This is where pictures of their three NBA titles line the walls.
There’s Wade celebrating with a trophy. There’s Wade with champagne. And now, last in the line of players, there was Wade running onto the Heat’s court for the first time since the spring of 2016.
The first of a night of cheers welcomed him. There are comebacks in sports. From injury. From deficits. From troubled times. This was the rarest comeback of them all, though, the one where a sports region’s favorite returns to play.
“We want Wade!” the crowd chanted in the opening minutes when he sat on the bench.
They got him a few minutes later. This was one of those days in sports that made sense. Wade was back. The arena was alive. And that smile from Whiteside, that big smile after a pass from Wade, said everything this night.