Lebron James, Dwayne Wade AND Chris Bosh all to the Miami Heat!!!

[Pat Riley]

http://www.realgm.com/src_wiretap_ar...se_miami_heat/

It will be official in about 12 hours time, but Lebron James will confirm that he is joining both Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh to play with the Miami Heat (my favourite team since 2002!) in the greatest free-agency period ever in the history of the NBA.

Lebron James averaged 30 points per game, 7 rebounds per game and 9 assists last season. Dwayne Wade averaged 27 points per game, 5 rebounds per game and 7 assist per game. Chris Bosh averaged 24 points and 11 rebounds per game. The three of them are regarded as 3 of the top 5 players in the NBA.

Whilst Wade and Bosh have agreed to terms with the Miami yesterday via a press conference, Lebron James remains the final big-named free-agent yet to agree to terms with an NBA team.

Never has anything of this nature or magnitude ever occurred in the NBA previously. Each player will sign for the maximum NBA salary, approximately $17M (in the first year, and increasing every year) for what will likely be 5 or 6 year contracts.

The Miami Heat were the only team in free-agency that began planning for the 2010 free-agency back in 2007. They did so by ensuring all of their players contracts expired after the 2009/2010 season to ensure they had maximum cap space to chase the highly prized pool of free-agents in the 2010 class and there were around 20 all-star / high quality players in the 2010 free-agent class. For those contracts past the 2009/2010 Miami entered into several trades over the last few years to ensure that they limited all salaries post 2010. Currently, the only players signed for the 2010 NBA season are are Michael Beasley at $5M pa and Mario Chalmers at $800k pa. With their $48M of free cap room currently, if Miami cannot arrange a trade to dump Michael Beasley in a sign and trade to Toronto or to another team with cap space in a one-sided deal for more or less nothing in return, it is believed the trio of Lebron, Wade and Bosh will agree to take a pay-cut of approximately $1M each in their first year (ie $15.5M or $16M) just to play each other.

Lebron, Wade and Bosh grew close playing together for the US Olympic team and have discussed playing with one another since 2008.

Lebron will be on ESPN to officially announce his decision on Thursday 9:00PM (US Time) in a 1 hour segment. Some people believe the reason for the 1 hour segment is due to both Wade and Bosh possibly joining him in the press conference with the media.

As a Miami Heat fan since 2002, I have been mashing my F5 key several times over the last week to try and see where each of the "Big 3" were going. I knew it was possible, but I never imagined that would all actually sign with Miami. In the basketball scene, this is the modern day equivalent of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Charles Barkley all agreeing to play for the one team.


http://www.nba.com/playerfile/lebron_james/index.html
http://www.nba.com/playerfile/dwyane_wade/index.html
http://www.nba.com/playerfile/chris_bosh/index.html