“I’m not presumptuous enough to think that you should always win. But you did it one team. We were one team.”
This is what Erik Spoelstra, wistfully overlooking Biscayne Bay, told then-senior writer Lee Jenkins in 2014 after the end of the Big Three era in Miami. For the past four years, South Florida had been the center of the basketball universe. Since LeBron James decided to join the Heat on July 8, 2010, he, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh have formed one of the most electrifying, polarizing, exhausting and thrilling trio in all sports.
The Big Three, as they were known, were a captivating basketball experiment, one that produced literal highs (the dunks!) And figurative highs (streak of 27 games!) On the field and spurred incredible hot shots (Dan Gilbert’s Letter! ) Before crashing to earth in a hot San Antonio gym.
The decision, the LeBron James television special announcing his intention to sign with Heat, was the crucial moment that laid the foundations for one of the most carefully examined teams in this country’s athletic history. Ten years after James said he would bring his talents to South Beach, what is the legacy of the Miami superteam?
On the pitch, calling Heat a disappointment may be too much, but the team certainly left something to be desired. Making four consecutive finals is absolutely nothing to complain about. But the expectations – set by James himself when he sadly stirred about how many rings he thought he, Wade and Bosh were capable of at the largest welcome gathering of all time – were much higher than two rings, a feeling that Spoelstra himself shared with Jenkins in 2014.
In terms of the best teams ever, while Miami at its best was perhaps as good as one of them, the Heat really needed a third ring to be in the category of the greats of all time. The Heatles are probably closer to the Bad Boy Pistons in terms of legacy than some of the league’s most indelible outfits. A third championship would have put Miami in conversation with Shaq and Kobe’s Lakers, or even with the Warriors of late 2010. Instead, the Heat has just gone down, thanks in large part to their collective collapse in the 2011 Finals, which saw a team of Miami heavily favored – rising 2-1 in the series – losing to a Mavericks team full of veterans but not stars, providing catharsis for a country that greedily cheers on the loser.
As much as the loss may have splintered from the legacy of Heat, it has also pushed them for success by moving forward.
“You never want to say that, but losing to Dallas was the best thing that happened to us,” Wade told SI during his last season in 2019. “Because if we had won… God. I don’t know what we would have done. We would have been so crazy … it would have been like a middle finger for everyone. “
James, in an e-mail to SI in 2019, echoed the thoughts of his racing partner: “We had moved away from playing with passion and pure love for the game, so he humiliated us and refocused us. He made us go back to saying, “Let’s have fun, let’s play for each other, let’s understand why we got together.” [Dwyane is] quite right. It was a great motivation for why we were able to succeed afterwards. “
After the loss of Mavs, the motivated heat unfolded on two straight rings, with many unforgettable moments along the way. “This is a damn time.” LeBron’s Game 6 in Boston. Ray Allen’s shot. “MJ Moment” by LeBron. The end was far less exciting, as an elderly, limping and mentally drained heat team was handled by the Spurs in the 2014 Finals, perhaps giving James the final push to go home to Cleveland.
By the summer of 2014, everyone seemed rather unhappy.
“In every situation we were fighting to simply stay above the range, trying to figure out how to sleep or rest our bodies,” Ray Allen told SI in 2017. “We wore out, we were tired and we were definitely tired of the end.”
Last year, Wade told SI that he was thinking of retiring due to the problems that caused his knees. Spoelstra told SI earlier this season that he had become so obsessed with the end result during the LeBron years that he would eventually feel he had to apologize to some of his players for not being the coach they needed. As much physical toll four consecutive final trips put the bodies of the players in the spotlight of being one the team seemed to wear them out as much as anything else.
While the results on the pitch never reached the heights imagined by the Big Three themselves when the team was formed, that vulnerability was a huge part of what made Heat so appealing. Miami’s flaws ultimately help make that team memorable. The heat was not a juggernaut. They inspired hatred. And their shoulders were against the wall enough times that the fragility of the experiment was always evident. The Big Three had a knack for drama, and the fact that the loss was often a very real possibility somehow made them more interesting than say, the Warriors led by Kevin Durant of recent history.
Even off-field impact cannot be minimized. LeBron’s decision was the first domino to fall into the era of player movement. The subsequent machinations of guys like Durant, Kawhi Leonard, Paul George, Kyrie Irving, Anthony Davis and others can be traced back to James’ signature in Miami.
“We knew we were changing the NBA landscape,” Wade told SI last year. “Everyone knows that the mentality of the players changed a bit that year. It’s something we are proud of, we are proud to put power in the hands of the players. “
The media has also changed following the Big Three. The hatred and spotlight of the first season, in particular, eventually gave way to an awakening, with the decisions of the players (for the most part) spurring pure vitriol much less as in 2010. By 2014, James he was hailed as a hero for signing with the Cavaliers, announcing his second decision by letter in an esteemed publication, although there were certainly some basketball motivations for his move as well.
The legacy of the Big Three, just like their real basketball trip, is unclear. At its peak, the team could compete with the best in history, but its peak was too short to be considered in the pantheon of teams of all time. Part of Heat’s appeal was the fact that they were not perfect and that their vulnerabilities added dramatic weight to the highs and lows. History will not remember the Big Three as the greatest team of all time. But he will remember them as one of the most captivating, most exciting, most maddening and most interesting teams ever, and one that had an effect in the NBA ecosystem long after its dissolution.
After all, as evidenced by the much appreciated welcome party one day after The Decision, the Big Three didn’t even need to play to get everyone’s attention.
“Thinking about it now, if someone said it’s not fantastic, I’d be like, ‘Come on, brother. Stop. Don’t you think it was cool? “” Bosh told SI about the 2019 welcome meeting. “It didn’t even happen again. Nobody ever did.
“30,000 people in places and we didn’t even have a basketball.”
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