The wealth of Dwyane Wade

Pat Riley is a winner and tends to make decisions tied to winning. Bringing Dwyane Wade back to South Beach, however, isn’t about winning. Bringing Dwyane Wade back to Miami is about respect and righting wrongs and riding off into the sunset, in the right way, for whatever that may or may not be worth.

Wade has been gone for only a season and a half. His departure feels forever ago. It was only yesterday. Josh Richardson, Goran Dragic, Hassan Whiteside, Justise Winslow, Tyler Johnson are all in Miami now, and they were all in Miami then. Udonis Haslem is always in Miami, and a few weeks from now, it will probably feel as if Dwyane Wade was always in Miami.

Dwyane Wade left Miami for Chicago. In his time there, he never quite fit with Rajon Rondo or Jimmy Butler. The skill sets did not stretch the floor, and the ages did not align. Dwyane Wade had already lifted one franchise on his back, and Atlas was never much for juggling. That whole affair was a homecoming, too, of sorts, and possibly if Rondo had not been injured in the Playoffs, the team could have made a run in the playoffs. Either way, the habitat wasn’t tenable, not in the long term, and especially for a player too old to think about the long term. None of those marquee names would suit up for the Bull this season, and Wade chose LeBron James over Pat Riley.

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Picking LeBron over Riley was about loyalty and legacy. In short: winning still mattered to Dwyane Wade.

When Wade left Miami, the key issues were over money and respect. Who knows which preceded the other as a cause or a correlation, the principle or the wealth? In the end, Wade’s short stint sojourning the league landed him $300,000 extra dollars. He’s probably not thinking so much about the figures as he travels back to where his career began. He has been humbled, which is not the same as suggesting he needed to be humbled. He didn’t.

Dwyane Wade is a unique basketball talent. One would almost reach for the cliché and suggest he’s a once in a generation talent, but his early rivals were prime Kobe Bryant and, of course, LeBron James. He was drafted in the same class as the latter. The NBA Finals have been deprived of Kobe, Wade, and LeBron only twice this century, in 2003, before the latter two were drafted, and in 2005, when the Detroit Pistons lost to the San Antonio Spurs. That’s a long time, and yet one found no difficulty in believing LeBron and Wade might find a way to lockdown such success for one more run.

And that’s always the mistake, isn’t it?

An old safe cracker just out of prison hatches one more scheme. He cycles through the old neighborhood and contacts everyone he can trust and shares his vision with such conviction that they all believe the heist is a matter of fate. But it’s not. People are clumsy and vain. Someone pulls a trigger, takes something extra, can’t keep his mouth shut, and, in the end, there’s Sterling Hayden in a pasture with the horses grazing over a fresh corpse.

That’s all rather grim, and while it all fits rather snugly with the recent Cleveland Cavs diaspora, it doesn’t fit entirely with Dwyane Wade’s own journey.

While his physical body failed LeBron’s leadership, LeBron’s leadership also failed the roster. Old age and a bankrupt culture spelled doom for this endeavor from the start. Maybe Wade realized all this early on when he submitted to being on the second unit. This early season move doubled as both a search for his own relevance on the roster as well as an effort to revive the community withering along the bench. On both counts, Wade essentially failed, uttering a couple days before he was traded: “No one’s coming to save us.” This statement was buzz worthy due to its fatalism, but he followed it with a statement about the team’s players needing to take responsibility for the lack of desired results. He seemed willing to die in a Bolivian shootout, playing a slow Sundance to LeBron’s Butch, and then he was gone.

Wade’s journey out of town coincided with five other players, including Isaiah Thomas, Jae Crowder, and Derrick Rose. The moves undid an entire off season of roster building, and the resemblance to a purge caused many on social media to envision LeBron as Michael Corleone or Nucky Thompson. Such comparisons, however, left no true analog for Wade, who departs Cleveland willingly and not necessarily as a character lacking agency.

For what it’s worth, the request is more reminiscent of Cutty from The Wire’s third season than The Godfather. Consider Cutty’s release from prison. Remember Wade’s release from Chicago. Consider Cutty’s signing on with the Barksdale crew as a contract killer, doing so based off a reputation lacking both recency and relevance. Then remember how the character fails to pull the trigger and requests to be left out of the turf wars and bloodletting. Recall the character’s request to be called Dennis and not Cutty and how in this new life he took to running a boxing gym and mentoring the youths of Baltimore. The man is a television character and Wade is a basketball player, but as LeBron and Cleveland go to the mattresses one more time, Wade is moving toward another role, which has less to do with violent analogies and more to do with final resting places– not for the dead, but for the living.

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Miami currently stands three games above .500 and seventh in the Eastern Conference. The team is only two games behind Cleveland, who currently holds the third seed. Dwyane Wade is unlikely to start for the Heat, and who knows exactly how he’ll fit in the guard rotation? But, to be honest, none of that really matters. He’s back, and that’s different from when he wasn’t.

If you happen to hear the speed bag’s steady rhythm, that’s Wade stepping away from the limelight’s carnage and into whatever comes next. If it is the end for a once in a generation talent, then at least it’s an end we can all live with.