Dwyane Wade’s ‘One Last Dance’
What will he bring to the Heat in his final NBA season?
MIAMI — Marketing boost? Check. Increased interest? Undoubtedly. Concluding memories? Priceless.
Those are the givens with Dwyane Wade’s decision to return for a 16th and final NBA season, his self-professed “One Last Dance,” replete with personalized hashtag.
Then there is the basketball element of the equation for the Miami Heat, where emotion is not a tangible metric and yet potentially stands more impactful than any playbook.
One need go back only three seasons for perspective, when Kobe Bryant opted for the written word, rather than Wade’s YouTube spoken words, with Bryant penning in his “Dear Basketball” in The Players Tribune, a farewell sonnet to the game, “I’m ready to let you go./I want you to know now/So we both can savor every moment we have left together.”
The Los Angeles Lakers finished that season 17-65, a hodgepodge roster of the promising youth of Julius Randle, Jordan Clarkson, D’Angelo Russell and Larry Nance, but also the endgame presence of Roy Hibbert, Brandon Bass and Ron Artest.
The identity of that season — the only identity of that
season — was each of Bryant’s 66 appearances, culminating with his 60-point performance in his final NBA bow.
“It’s fun to put a smile on their faces and hopefully have this be an experience that they’ll cherish for a time to come,” Bryant said along the way to that epic closing night.
For Bryant and a Lakers team that would spend two more years in the lottery wilderness, seeking salvation that only would arrive with LeBron James’ latest relocation, it was a season for posterity, nostalgia, tribute.
For the Heat, the canvas is now available for something similar, if not necessarily as drab. The Heat stood 29-26 when Wade arrived back home from the Cleveland Cavaliers last February, going 15-12 the balance of the season with No. 3 back on the roster. Essentially, the same standings impact.
But Wade’s return also came with Dion Waiters out for the season following January ankle surgery, easily slotted into that vacated role, at a time when Rodney McGruder was attempting to regain traction from preseason leg surgery that still had him out of the lineup, well before Derrick Jones Jr. would show in summer league that he potentially could stand as the Heat’s next wave of perimeter athleticism.
For the Heat, much had changed since Wade left for the Chicago Bulls amid his acrimonious free agency in 2016. Waiters, James Johnson, Kelly Olynyk and Wayne Ellington had been brought in to diversify an attack that had grown so Wade-centric in the wake of James’ Heat departure and Chris Bosh’s illness absence. Justise Winslow and Josh Richardson had been asked to take on more responsibility as the team’s potential next wave of youth.
The difference between the Kobe endgame and the Wade endgame is that the transition never truly began until Bryant exited, even with his preceding injury absences. Only when the clock hit zeroes on April 13, 2016 could the Lakers contemplate change.
Goran Dragic, Hassan Whiteside, Tyler Johnson, Richardson, Winslow and Udonis Haslem remain from Wade’s most recent complete season with the Heat. But the rest of the roster has evolved.
Erik Spoelstra now finds himself with the ability to field an entire starting lineup of shooting guards and even have some in reserve, when counting Tyler Johnson, Waiters, Richardson, Ellington, McGruder, Jones and, again, Wade.
This is a team that went into the luxury tax in July to retain Ellington, invested in a rookie-scale extension in Richardson last summer, a guaranteed contract this summer in Jones, will pay out $19.5 million each of the next two seasons to Johnson, worked relentlessly to rehabilitate Waiters and McGruder.
And, yet, there remain both expectations for and from the 36-year-old Wade.
In late July, Heat President Pat Riley said, “I still see a player who can contribute heavily if he really wants to . . . . We don’t want him back as a place-mat holder or somebody who’s going to be a veteran in the locker room. Dwyane is a great player, a great talent. He’s not the same guy he was in 2006, but he can be a very good player for us and can make a big difference for us. We want him back as a guy that realizes if this is going to be his last year or whatever, we want this to be his best year ever.”
Then, Sunday, in his “Last Dance” soliloquy, Wade stressed, “Yeah, I’m not as quick as I used to be. Yeah, I don’t jump as high as I used to — and boy I used get up. Yeah, I don’t. Yeah, I don’t. Yeah, I don’t. But there’s things in this game that I can write a book on, that I can still do and I still can accomplish.”
The emotional edge to 2018-19 will be unlike any of the preceding 30 Heat seasons. With Hardaway, Shaq, Zo, LeBron, Bosh, they were just . . . gone.
Now, left to Spoelstra and his staff will be the complexities of where the basketball component will fit into the equation of emotion.