The Miami Heat Want to Go Home Again

The NBA's Eastern Conference is undergoing a sea change in the wake of LeBron James's decision to leave Miami for Cleveland. A series of high-profile player moves have turned conference on its head—there's no real favorite as of yet in the race to make it to the Finals and lose to the Spurs. Welcome to the Inscrutable East, our offseason rundown of the teams that matter.

I went to upstate New York last November to visit a dear friend who had just finished a tour in Afghanistan. To my disappointment, it seemed a couple years in the army emboldened him to become his worst self. A muscled dickstrongness had crowded out the most appealing parts of his personality. He spoke in hashtag-like catchphrases now and stretched swaggy bro cardigans across his rectangular frame. I made fun of him to my other friends when he wasn't around, with deliberate unease.

On the first night we hung out, he disappeared for an hour and came back too drunk. He insisted we go get something to eat, then berated a pair of high school girls who were drinking vodka out of a water bottle in the scuzzy dining area of a sub shop. The police were called. He ran away, and we didn't see him again until morning. I knew as we walked around my old home's smallish downtown, calling his name like he was a lost dog, that our friendship was likely over. He was too much of an asshole to love anymore. The two of us spent the next evening together only corporeally. On day three, he said he wanted to go to a dance club inside an Indian reservation casino. I balked. We haven't spoken since.

All of this is to say Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade are going to try to make this LeBron-less Heat thing work. It kind of will, but ultimately won't because they've replaced the best basketball player alive with Luol Deng and reinforced their bench with Danny Granger, Josh McRoberts, and Shabazz Napier. They'll win their fare share of regular season games, maybe even a bunch, and flame out somewhere along the line. Over the next few years, Wade's knees will deteriorate further, and the team will get progressively worse.

Most athletes frame big decisions as indicative of their character. Signing with one team over another isn't ever about practicalities, but a higher calling. When Bosh reupped with the Heat, his Twitter announcement touted his readiness for his "next challenge," and Wade's treated Miami as if it were his spiritual homeland. This is useless rhetoric—that Sportscenter anchorsread these types of things on-air is a sign of our cultural decline—but it's not released into the internet ether thoughtlessly. You can discern from those bits of banality that Wade and Bosh want to be perceived as men of principle who remained in Miami, not for the totally acceptable reasons that they like living there and want to get paid like they wouldn't anywhere else, but due to their ambition, commitment, and assorted other nouns culled from the bingo card of sportsisms.

When reality sucks, one can always rely on ideas for comfort. LeBron's tenure in Miami wasn't motivated by high-mindedness. Dude wanted to win titles and play with his friends. Now that he's gone, the famous teammates he left behind need something to buoy them. Title runs end, but Wade's Love for His City is eternal. Or so he tells us and maybe himself. Thinking this way works about as well as you believe it does, but delusion is delicate. I wonder, when two-thirds of the Big Three show up for training camp, and their best teammate's absence becomes starkly apparent, if they will realize the truth: Shit, this might be over. Perhaps they already do.

Some projects are doomed, but go on anyway. Change is a difficult thing to choose; usually it's inflicted upon us instead. If my old friend still lived where I live, we would probably grab a drink once in a while. This would be sometimes enjoyable, sometimes awful, and never the same as it used to be. Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade are still themselves, and the Heat will still be quite good next season. But something will be missing, and, well, there's not much they can do about it.

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