Dwyane Wade will go down as the greatest the Miami Heat have had in their short history. He’ll go down as on of the greatest guards to bless this game and is definitely in the battle for greatest Chicago born players next to Isiah Thomas.
If you’re on social media regularly you may have seen ESPN plugging their #NBARank Top 100 which is the most random list I have ever seen in my life. How did they do this? Is it purely statistical? I really want to know how they created this list. By the way they failed from the start by putting Shawn Kemp at 100.
Anyways ESPN’s Scoop Jackson kicked it with Dwyane Wade, talking about his position in the list along with his take on the 06 Finals and how injuries have affected his legacy.
Scoop: All of this brings me back to after Game 2 of the 2006 Finals. Remember you were sick in Games 1 and 2, and you didn’t play that well and Dallas was thinking they kinda had you where they wanted you.
And I remember you grabbed me as I was walking down the corridor and put your arm around me and you said, “They don’t even know what I have coming for them. I ain’t sick anymore. I’m good now. Just watch.”
Wade: Now that you brought that up, I remember that. Look, I knew. Because at that time in the NBA I felt that I was the best player in the game. That’s the confidence that I had. What I brought to the game was as good as or better than anyone at that point.
Think about it — and this is what is going on in my mind at the time: I’d just finished dominating a series against Detroit. I shot 50-something percent in a series versus the best defensive team in the league, a team that no one could score against, and I was shooting a high 50 percent from the field.
I just dominated that series and I had gotten sick in the last game of that series and it carried on into (the Finals). And I just felt at the time, I just knew that Dallas — not saying anything bad against them — didn’t have anyone that could guard me one-on-one. And I knew once I started feeling better that I was going to take off. Now I had no idea that I was going to do those types of things.
I could watch those last few games forever. Greatest individual performance I have ever seen in the NBA Finals and probably the best one you have ever seen.
Scoop: I’m glad you mentioned that, I want to get back to that and you. What impact do you feel your injuries have had on your career and the player you had the possibility of becoming?
Wade: Injuries just take away from your game. Like when you have multiple injuries like I have, they take away from what people will say made you special. I’ve had three knee surgeries, I’ve had shoulder surgery. Knee surgeries take away from your explosiveness and many other things.
Imagine if Wade didn’t have all those surgeries and had a MJ, LeBron type of health, a man can dream. After Wade talked about looking up to the MJ’s Bird’s and Magic’s, he is confident that he should be involved in legendary conversations.
Scoop: Do you feel that you belong in those types of conversations?
Wade: You know what … yes. Now what conversation, I don’t know. Do I feel I belong in the Michael Jordan conversation? Hell no! Maybe when I’m done with my career I can look at it as a whole and see, but I’m not going to say right now that I belong in the Jordan, Magic Johnson and those guys conversation.
But the players I grew up watching, the Iversons, the McGradys, those players that I grew up respecting so much and patterning my game after? Yeah, I belong in the conversation with those guys.
You’re crazy if you don’t put him on the legends table, the fact that he can still ball after all the injuries he’s had, that’s something he’s done better than Kobe and the term ‘Washed’ should never be in the same sentence as this man.
