LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Miami Heat Fine After All

LeBron James has now led the Miami Heat to their third NBA Finals in three consecutive seasons. Is this enough to call the 2012-13 Miami Heat season a success?

Enough is never enough. The house is great, but it can always be bigger. A job is great but it could always pay better. You love your wife, but she hogs the bed. You love your husband, but he hasn’t bought you flowers since God knows when. A Saturn Ion is not a Honda Accord and a Honda Accord is not a Mercedes Benz. The grass is always greener on the other side.

For reasons I don’t understand, the Miami Heat are the job, the house, the relationship that a majority of us are ready to move away from. We have the basketball equivalent of The Beatles and yet we’re cheering for Yoko Ono to break everything up. Their top competitors, the Indiana Pacers, the San Antonio Spurs, the Oklahoma City Thunder, we treat them like a hot girl at the bar only seeing the positives and ignoring any potential flaws. Spoiler alert: She too will eventually complain about the toilet seat not being down.

But Miami’s flaws? Oh, they’re appalling! A banged up shooting guard. A soft power forward. No inside post presence. Lack of top 30 point guard. This team is beyond repair; blow it up, start all over.

I would argue the exact opposite. I think in today’s NBA, especially with the new pseudo salary cap, you could not construct a better team than the Miami Heat’s roster. Pat Riley’s brain is like the inside of one of those Autotrader commercials: Alright let’s start with the best player in the league who can play all five positions. Give me a shooting guard who is also a top 10 player and a power forward who can drain the mid-range jumper.

Let’s surround those three with the best three-point shooter of all-time (Ray Allen), a guy who can drain threes automatically even after weeks of inactivity (Mike Miller) and a guy whose resume includes quite possibly the most clutch three in NCAA tournament history (Mario Chalmers). Oh, and they all play incredibly hard on defense. Let’s add two big men who can’t miss (Haslem and Birdman), a backup point guard who can go off (Cole) and the King of the Flop who brings one to two charges a game (Battier).

Vulnerable to opposing big men? Absolutely, but this isn’t the '90s. You don’t have to overstock your roster with bigs to combat Shaquille O’Neal, Tim Duncan, David Robinson, Kevin Garnett, Patrick Ewing, Hakeem Olajuwon, Alonzo Morning, Karl Malone and I’m probably forgetting a Hall of Famer—that’s how good that era was for big men.

Today’s NBA has Andrew Bynum who logs 82 games every three or four years. Dwight Howard whose offensive post moves are still behind LeBron and Carmelo’s. Tim Duncan’s near the end of his career. Same for Kevin Garnett. Brook Lopez, Roy Hibbert and Marc Gasol would not have started in front of the names in the last paragraph.

The Heat’s big man disadvantage was exposed in this series, yes, but so was Indiana’s disadvantage against LeBron James, most notably in Game 7 when LeBron had another monster game, you know the kind when he casually hits his face on the rim mid-dunk, and held Pacers star Paul George to seven points. In fact, 29 NBA teams go into every game against the Heat knowing an unstoppable 6’8’’ point forward will be penciled in for 27-8-7. And that’s just an average night.

Dwyane Wade is a shell of himself but ‘himself’ is a Hall of Famer, the best shooting guard of his generation (I’m saying Kobe is from the previous generation). Chris Bosh would start for almost every team in the NBA. This team won 27 games in a row! They are four wins away from finishing off one of the best seasons of all time. This is their third NBA Finals in three years. Yet last night the belief was the Heat were 48 minutes away from potentially needing a drastic change.

We can wait a little longer before scheduling the funeral ceremony.