There are three players on the Miami Heat who might believe that they are their team’s best player, and they’re all wrong.
Dwyane Wade is the team’s face, its heart and its bizarrely dressed soul, but he hasn’t been the Heat’s best player since LeBron James took his talents to South Beach in 2010.
Goran Dragic is Miami’s latest star recruit and the most recent player on the Heat roster to find himself on an All-NBA team. But Dragic has struggled over the past year to find his own light in Wade’s shadow, and ball-handling and play-making duties have been an awkward, two left-feet tango between the stars in Miami’s backcourt.
Hassan Whiteside is the Heat’s wildcard, the league’s most prolific pure shot-blocker in years. The problem is that ‘wild’ card is too perfect a description for Whiteside, a player who has been infamously erratic with his behaviour. He’s often a one-effort player, he can’t shoot free throws, and his defence outside of shot-blocking is inconsistent at best.
Wade, Dragic and Whiteside are odd, tremendously talented, poorly fitting pieces who make the Heat so tantalising.
The reason they’re not just tantalising but meaningfully compelling, with perhaps the highest ceiling of any team in the East to challenge Cleveland, is that they have Chris Bosh to glue these weird pieces together.
Bosh is the Heat’s best player and it’s not especially close. The problem is that he’s so modest, on and off the court, that he’s probably the least likely of the four Heat stars to assert himself as such.
Bosh has long been one of the league’s darlings, beloved by the media for being one of the NBA’s most articulate, genuine stars. The public hasn’t accorded Bosh the same respect.
Bosh seems destined to forever be known as the third Heatle, someone who should have been treated as the George Harrison of the team and not Ringo Starr. ‘Bosh Spice’ continues to stick, and his strangely over-exuberant, faux-angry celebrations have made him a comical figure at times. He never rebounded enough in the LeBron years, averaging less than seven boards in the 2012-13 and 2013-14 seasons, despite being the team’s primary big man. When the big moments came, Bosh was typically a decoy, a passive ghost, deferring to the ‘real’ stars, Wade and LeBron. He will always be remembered for going scoreless in Game 7 of the 2013 finals.
But these perceived shortcomings are largely noise for the sake of noise. The Heat were an easy target in the Big Three era, and Wade’s championship history and the force of LeBron’s personality and play often made Bosh the least complicated target. He was Chris, the quiet, nerdy guy who likes fancy restaurants and cried after the Heat lost the 2011 finals. Attacks against his play bordered on attacks against his masculinity, and because Bosh had too much integrity to address the criticisms, they just kept on coming. When in doubt, take a cheap shot at Chris Bosh.
But the reality is that after the first LeBron season, Bosh was Miami’s second-most important player, usurping a fading Wade in the pecking order. LeBron was the genius that drove the Heat engine, but Bosh was the team’s leather interior, the player who smoothed the gaps and allowed the Heat to look as slick as they did playing small. A perpetually underrated defender, Bosh spaced the floor at the five on offence but protected the rim on defence, allowing Miami’s dominant hyper-active counter-attacking defence to prosper.
He didn’t seem to shade from clutch moments out of fear, he simply deferred to the team’s two dominant personalities. Perhaps that is Bosh’s greatest weakness, the fact that he is so willing to defer, and doesn’t assert his talent as much as he should. But it’s also his greatest strength; the man assimilates, always adjusting to the team ethos. Wade is perceived as a warrior, someone who will do anything for his team to win, but Bosh is the player who has proven he will truly go to those lengths, a max player who was willing to be a third banana at the expense of his public profile.
When Bosh was called upon in the clutch he stepped up too, nailing the dagger to beat Dallas on the road in Game 3 of the 2011 finals, and raining threes on Boston to close out Game 7 of the 2012 conference finals.
The Heat were supposed to slide into anonymity once LeBron left but Bosh’s surprise re-signing, spurning the Rockets in the process, allowed Miami to remain in the conversation. Before going down with a blood clot, last season Bosh was having his best statistical season since his Toronto days, rising to the pressure of franchise player in James’ absence.
He’s picked up this season where he left off last, quietly averaging a 19-8 with 2.5 assists and 1.7 threes per game on typically efficient percentages. He’s become lethal from three, launching 4.4 a game and hitting 38 per cent of them. Remember, last year was the first season where Bosh had ever averaged one made three per game, and since then he’s emerged as one of the game’s elite marksmen from downtown.
The Heat are a clutter. They have a top-ten defence but the offence is an awkward, grinding work in progress, ranking middle of the road and constantly struggling to find space to operate with Wade, Dragic, Whiteside and Deng all starting – four below-average shooters. This season the Heat have had negative net ratings when either Wade or Whiteside have been on the court, while Dragic’s positive impact (a 2.3 net rating) has been minor.
But there’s Chris Bosh – about to be an 11 time All-Star who basketball reference gives a 98.6 per cent chance of making the Hall of Fame, with a positive net rating (+5.7), twice as high as any of the Heat’s other big names – quietly making his living in the shadows of South Beach’s brighter stars, and not caring one bit about all the noise.
As per usual.
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