Don’t Blame Pat Riley
Wade’s departure is much more complicated than that
If you were following NBA Free Agency last summer, you’ll remember how shocking it was when Dwyane Wade announced that he would not be returning to the Miami Heat, the team he had played his entire career for and won 3 championships with, and would instead sign with his hometown Chicago Bulls. After fruitlessly pursuing Kevin Durant and resigning Hassan Whiteside to a max contract, the Heat offered Wade 2 years for $40 million while the Bulls offered $47M. For Wade, a selfless teammate who sacrificed both shots and money (he was never even Miami’s highest paid player) in the pursuit of championships, the Heat’s unwillingness to meet his demands was, undoubtedly, a very painful insult.
In the wake of his departure, many placed direct blame on Pat Riley, President and GM of the Heat, for not showing loyalty to his franchise player. Wade himself stated that a “business” rift with Riley played a large part in his decision to leave. But consider Riley’s position for a moment: Wade is a 35 year old guard whose numbers have been dropping off in the last few years, and he chose to trade maximum contracts for championship teammates LeBron James and Chris Bosh, nobody placed a gun to his head and forced him to do that. If you take a look at Wade’s numbers this season it’s clear that Riley was right. He’s not worth the money that Chicago paid him. It was smart of Riley to save the cap space for potential free agents this upcoming summer. I have no doubt that the Heat would have ensured that Wade had a position with the franchise for the rest of his life, similar to how the Lakers took care of Magic Johnson (not that he needed it). He would have been taken care of.
But, then again, it’s hard to not feel for Dwyane Wade. He was once a top-3 player in the league but was never paid like one. The sad reality is that one’s compensation is very often tied to their self-worth. Last summer was the Heat’s chance to finally let Wade know just how much he meant to them and they spit in his face. It mattered little to Wade that they would always have a place for him within the franchise when Mike Conley, a player who has never made an All NBA Team or even an All Star Game, had just signed the richest contract in league history and Hassan Whiteside, another accolade-less youngster, was given a maximum contract by his franchise. It’s easy to see why he decided to leave and still hasn’t spoken to Pat Riley, his one-time coach and mentor. But if Wade really wants someone to blame, he should point the finger at his own agent, Henry Thomas.
Thomas currently represents over $150 million worth of current contracts in the NBA and his high-profile clients include Wade, Bosh and their one-time teammate Udonis Haslem. During the summer of 2014, the year Miami lost in the Finals to the San Antonio Spurs, Dwyane Wade opted out of a contract that would have paid him ~$42 million over the next 2 seasons in order to give the Heat a chance to resign LeBron James and Chris Bosh. When James decided to return to the Cavaliers (that’s something you can legitimately blame Pat Riley for), Wade ended up resigning for $10 million less. Meanwhile, Chris Bosh was courted by the Houston Rockets to the tune of $88 million. The Heat offered $95M hoping to pay Bosh and Wade $18M apiece (per season) while also retaining some cap space to pursue other talent. But his agent, Henry Thomas, refused to accept anything less than the maximum contract that he deserved. So Miami was strong-armed by Wade’s own agent into forfeiting all their cap space for a player of questionable value, a player who, unfortunately, has barely been on the court the past 2 seasons. Bosh would receive $118 million over 5 years, around $20M per season while Wade’s deal got him $15M for the 2015–16 campaign and he spent another season not being the highest paid player on his team.
When the summer of 2016 came around, the Heat were strapped for cash, left with a maximum of $39M to spend during the offseason. Why was there only $39M total cap space? Almost half of Miami’s entire cap was being occupied by the contracts already given to Bosh ($23.7M), Goran Dragic ($15M), Josh McRoberts ($5M) and Justise Winslow ($2.5M). Wade’s demand of ~$23M would’ve obliterated the Heat’s chances of signing any young talent and remaining competitive in LeBron’s East. With the Hassan Whiteside bidding war in progress, Miami was forced to fork over ~$23M to him or lose him to the Dallas Mavericks. Now, with the possibility of getting what he wanted (what he probably deserved given his loyalty over the years) off the table, Wade pursued other options and ended up in Chicago.
Had Bosh accepted Miami’s original counter of $18–19M/season, a much more accurate contract given his abilities and age, Miami would have had $44M in cap space, and could have signed both Wade and Whiteside for ~$22M for one or two seasons, then given Whiteside a player option in the third year, assuming Wade would have taken a smaller salary at that point, and signed him to a bigger contract. Instead, Thomas’s greed, and conflict of interest, enriched one of his clients at the expense of the other. He must have known that negotiating a major contract for Bosh would impact Wade’s future earnings capacity because, after all he’s an NBA agent. But he didn’t care. He knew that at the end of the day he and Wade could make Riley look like the bad guy and they would come out of the situation unscathed.
Sadly, Thomas failed to take into account the emotional aspect of his business. Players get attached to their city, their fans, and their teammates, or at least they used to, and playing the mercenary is much harder than it looks on paper. Some players do it well: Darrelle Revis, Ray Allen and Jamaal Crawford are perfect examples. But for a franchise player it’s much harder to separate from the team that he has played for his whole life, the city that he loves and loves him back. Dwyane Wade is no mercenary, he’s a franchise player without a franchise and the man to blame for that isn’t Pat Riley, it’s Henry Thomas.
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