The NBA sidekick Hall of Fame
By Bryan Harvey
Chris Bosh and Kevin Love
When Chris Bosh took his talents to South Beach, he didn’t just change his game, but he changed the way other bigs played. In fact, late-career Tim Duncan looked a lot like Miami-era Bosh, as did the Marc Gasol who ended the Grit-N-Grind era in Memphis shooting 3s and eventually winning a championship in Toronto. Speaking of the North, Bosh is one of the many lost Toronto Raptors. In five of his seven seasons with the franchise, he averaged over 20.0 points per game.
As the third Heatle, though, Bosh sometimes came across as the Ringo Starr to LeBron James and Dwyane Wade’s Paul and John act. In truth, he was much closer to being George in terms of talent. Resulting from such slander, he probably never received as much credit as he should have, not in terms of official accolades, but in terms of public opinion. Much of that is in the eye of the beholder, and some of that is the result of that Miami super-team’s short run and Bosh’s susceptibility to internet puns. They only played together for four full seasons, earning four trips to the Finals and winning a total of two championships.
The run altered the NBA landscape and seized fire from the front offices, but the brevity of it all did not allow for a sharing of the accolades. Bosh’s production was always in closer reach of Wade’s than Wade’s was to LeBron’s, but mostly, Bosh was rewarded with corny tweets (admittedly, they were easy to send). The book opened and closed with LeBron’s decisions. Dwyane Wade wrote the introduction. Bosh’s career surrendered to blood clotting and came under fire from constant trade rumors, while what he meant to the city and the team seems somewhat lost.
The much-maligned Kevin Love will still be only 30 years old for another couple months. He is also a better basketball player than many of us remember.
He spent six seasons in Minnesota before being traded to Cleveland and contributing to King James’ redemption tour. Those per game averages dipped (as they had to dip) upon his arriving in Cleveland. He could in no way average 26 points a night as a teammate of LeBron James and Kyrie Irving. He needed to follow in the footsteps of Chris Bosh, even if he and Bosh did not play the same game.
From the outside, his time as a subject in the King’s court left him looking belabored or lost in some labyrinth of the soul, and yet the 17.1 points per game and 10.0 rebounds per game suggest that no matter what expression washed across his face, basketball was still basketball. In the end, the one ring he, Kyrie and LeBron won together was in large part due to his defensive stand against Stephen Curry at a time when defense mattered the most. The point of sacrificing the numbers is to have the opportunity at such assignments, at such moments when legacies swing open or shut with a single stop; a shuffling of the feet.
More often than not, talented players are drafted into these positions of sacrifice. Bosh and Love, however, were not, and that makes them especially diplomatic.