It’s not often that an NBA title is anything other than an apex. Dirk Nowitzki shook off various career-poisoning labels when his Mavericks outmatched the Heat in 2011; LeBron James did the same in 2012. The NBA Finals is a giant hump and stars spend careers trying to get over it. Some never quite make it – Charles Barkley and Karl Malone, famously – and for others it doesn’t really matter. Allen Iverson will never be judged in championship terms.
For Dwyane Wade, the 2006 Miami Heat NBA title, or more directly his performance in those six games, was a harbinger. Earlier in the season, gel-lathered hardwood kingpin Pat Riley swooped down from his tiny glass box to kick aside Stan Van Gundy, a high-pitched and portly but undoubtedly talented coach in his own right, to reroute the ship and save the season. An aging Shaq willfully handed over the reins to Dwyane Wade. Udonis Haslem was presumably being the heart of the team, just as he’s been credited in these 2013 NBA Playoffs. Gary Payton was still playing basketball and he wasn’t just padding his Hall of Fame resume, even if he definitely was.
But Dwyane Wade was only a third-year player then. He averaged nearly 35 points per game in the series and lived at the free throw line. Though his supporting cast was hardly dynastic – championship infrastructure doesn’t typically include Antoine Walker, Jason Williams, James Posey and post-peak Alonzo Mourning – it was reflective of a certain truth about the brimming star himself, that he was exactly that. It’s just that his coming out party so happened to coincide with and end in the Larry O’Brien trophy. In the narrative-laden NBA, when championships supposedly pay the toll of multiple failures and near broken egos and various and trying adversity, Wade had skipped a few steps. There was a rookie in a loaded draft class and an outstanding second season and a championship. He was 24 years old.
Then there were injuries and first round losses and years lost. Pat Riley slunk back into his emotionless and franchise-looming shadow. Dwyane Wade, as with the rest of the league, folded into LeBron James, second class among first class basketball citizens. Expectation, it seemed, had been fulfilled. What was once promise was shelved memory. Meanwhile Riley began to puppeteer the great coup of the 2010 offseason, parking lot handshakes and basement deals and all those slicked-back, mafia hair transactions. By the end of it, a handful of fan bases were emotionally spent and LeBron James and Chris Bosh were on their way to South Beach. Dwyane Wade’s career, as it was in an individual sense, was effectively over at the age of 28.
And that’s what’s here, in 2013, with these Finals. 2006 was the last time Dwyane Wade was ever Dwyane Wade on a national stage. I don’t remember anything particular about those Finals, other than lots of foul calls and years-later relief that Twitter was not around for what would have been inevitable real-time conspiracy baiting. But it’s the last time any of us saw Dwyane Wade play the game of basketball as dictated by his promise, and that’s mildly depressing.