Will Wade Stay Or Go? Clock Starts For Heat, Riley

Pat Riley's officially on the clock.

I'm not talking about the Heat's pick in next year's draft. I'm referring to the Dwyane Wade clock. Riley's got two years to convince Wade that this team is worth sticking around for.

With the news today that Riles plans on stepping down as coach at the end of the season, Riley is realizing that he's got way too much on his plate now that his team is lottery-bound.

Things didn't look like they'd be this bleak at the onset of the season. Riles was convinced that with Wade and Shaquille O'Neal he could surround them with, I don't know, Smush Parker and Mark Blount and they'd be able to compete come April. It shouldn't have come as a surprise to him. With the emergence of the Cavs, Raptors, Magic and Bulls, and the transformation of the Celtics, Riley should have realized that he wasn't going to get a playoff spot just for showing up.

With a cap number that's already at the limit, Riley has a decision to make. Does he try to make another move out of desperation by trading Jason Williams' expiring contract and maybe Udonis Haslem for a another team's trash or does he just wait for the contracts of his current team to expire before rebuilding?

The problem with the latter is  that those contracts that might give Riley some flexibility don't expire for another two and a half years.

As of right now the Heat are paying $62 million this season to just Shaq, Wade, Williams, Blount, Davis and Haslem. The salary cap is a tad under $56 million. Even with Williams' and Davis' expiring contracts the Heat are still paying almost $49 million to those other four guys, not only for next year, but the following year as well.

Daequan Cook is the only other player currently under contract for next season at about $1.3 million. That means the Heat will have about $4.5 million to spend in free agency but with a minimum of eight more players to fill the roster. 

The only chip that Riley will have to play with this off-season is his mid-level exemption and the veteran's minimum exemption. But now the circumstances are different for the Heat. The rules change when a team no longer has the capability of competing for a championship.

It's much harder to get the top-tier free agents to take pay cuts to join a team that's in the lottery. Those teams end up being forced to overpay for second and third-tier free agents because they need to make a move to save face with the fans. Just look at the contracts of Vlad Radmanovic, Jerome James, Bobby Simmons and Jared Jeffries.

The problem with the mid-level exemption is that it's only available to teams that are

over the cap. So if Riley decides to not trade Williams or Davis, and opts not to re-sign either of them, then all he'll have to play with his that $4.5 million for eight players.

If you add on the additional $2 million Riley will have to pay a lottery draft pick you're really looking at $2.5 million.

But wait.

Smush Parker has a player option for $2.4 million that's all but assured of being exercised. Riley would love to trade him but who wants to trade for a suspended player who has his own option for next year? Maybe Riley thinks that he can make Smush so miserable by not letting him play that Parker will waive the second-year option on his contract to make it happen. I doubt the player's union would support that.

Riley can't afford to just wait for all of those contracts to come off the books either. If he plans to wait until 2010 then he might as well trade Wade now. Wade is a very special player in that he cares about winning more than he cares about money.

That doesn't mean he doesn't care about money. It means that he'll take a little bit less money to play for a contender. Since teams can spend more money to retain their own free agents than other teams can offer, the difference isn't substantial enough to make Wade think twice about leaving. Especially when you factor in that he's probably got another long-term contract left in his career.

If he signs a four-year deal in 2010 he'll only be 32 when it ends. He'll have the right to opt-out in 2013 and he'll sign a five or six-year deal for plenty of dough to compensate.

How did the Heat go from NBA Champs to lottery-bound in less than two years? Riley allowed free agent after free agent to leave. Heat owner Micky Arison's unwillingness to pay the luxury tax led James Posey, Eddie Jones and Jason Kapono to go elsewhere.

It's hard to hold Arison accountable for Kapono when nobody anticipated Toronto would offer him four years and $24 million. But Posey and Jones each got two-year contracts from the Celtics and Mavericks, respectively. Both guys got one year-deals with player options for the second year and neither player is making more than $4 million.

Had the Heat given them those exact deals then they would have two more chips to work with. Instead Riley replaced them with Smush Parker and Penny Hardaway and then traded one bad contract (Antoine Walker) for one less-expensive horrible contract (Blount) and one expiring contract (Davis).

Would those three players have made the Heat a contender if they were still in Miami? Probably not. But at least Riley would have had two serviceable veterans with reasonable contracts to use in trade if he'd kept Posey and Jones. 

All this means is that Riley will have to get creative in a hurry. He's going to have to make a trade. The problem is that he's only got a couple of trade options. He can either trade his expiring contracts to a team desperate to clear cap space or, more realistically, he can trade them for someone else's trash.

Are there any teams desperate to clear cap space? You can exclude most teams in the Eastern Conference since they don't really want to help a team that they're currently better than that still has Dwyane Wade to build around. Why would Philadelphia trade them Andre Miller when they can get cap space and a talented player for him from someone else?

If you look at the Western Conference, there are teams like Sacramento and Memphis that might be looking to get under the cap but could also do better than Williams and/or Davis for Ron Artest, Mike Bibby or Pau Gasol.

That leaves the Heat with option number two and that's to take back someone else's trash. There's a way to do both options and that's by getting a talented player along with trash. The Kings might be looking to take advantage of the Heat by making them take back a horrible contract in addition to a talented player.

The Kings might be willing to unload Mike Bibby if the Heat would take Kenny Thomas with him. A trade of Williams, Davis and Dorrell Wright for Bibby and Thomas works under the cap. That trade would save the Kings more than $20 million next season. Thomas still has two more years left after this one.

The Heat have to ask themselves how much better of a team they are with Bibby and Thomas to justify paying Thomas $18 million for the next two seasons. Bibby also has just one year left on his deal after this one.

Memphis, on the other hand, knows that they can get a lot more than the Heat can offer for either Pau Gasol or Mike Miller. They also know that they can wait until the off-season to trade them since neither is eligible for free agency.

Things would be easier for the Heat if they had talented players to offer but Daquean Cook is making too little money to make it worth trading him. Haslem started out the season great and has steadily decreased his production as the season has gone on. Suddenly he looks overpaid. 

Memphis does have trash they might be willing to trade the Heat. The Grizzlies could offer Damon Stoudamire and Stromile Swift for Williams' expiring deal. Stoudamire has already been told the team is trying to trade him. Both Stoudamire and Swift have one year remaining on their deals.

In essence, Riley could buy himself another year and see if the landscape changes while each of his current contracts moves a year closer to free agency. At worst, Stoudamire and Swift will be two expiring contracts he can move next year.

The Grizzlies would get themselves around $10 million in cap space to pursue free agents with this off-season.

There are GMs in Seattle and Minnesota who are glad they're not in the position that Riley is in. With the exception of the Knicks, there isn't a franchise in the NBA right now with a future that looks more bleak than the Heat's. At least the Wolves have young and talented players.

Is this a case of déjà vu all over again with Riley? Is his stepping down as head coach another example of Riley jumping ship when things get bad? I don't necessarily think so. I think Riley's exit is his acknowledgement that he's now paying the price for mortgaging a bright future to win for the present. It's also a case of him recognizing that if his star player leaves town it might be too big a hole for him to dig out of. At that point the Heat will have gone from NBA Champs to expansion team status.