Dwyane Wade has been a damn good player for nine years in the NBA. He’s got a Finals MVP… he’s been a scoring champ… an All Star almost every year… it’s a very impressive resume. And up until a few years ago, I kind of liked him. He played hard, he made fun commercials… he put forth a very palatable personna.
Then he turned into Ndamukong Suh… a talented player who plays dirty for no reason whatsoever.
Wade has developed a pattern of dirty play that has gone unchecked by the NBA. From trying to break Rajon Rondo’s arm, to nearly killing Darren Collison, Wade has figured out sneaky way to make obviously dirty play that can be summed up best by this tweet:]
Dwyane Wade is an all-time great, but he has a well-established behavioral pattern now: Dirty play, with shred of plausible deniability.
— Zach Lowe (@ZachLowe_NBA) December 27, 2012
Yes, Wade leaves himself a little bit of wiggle room with every dirty play. He was at it again last night.
[youtube id=”ZKp5UOewwow” width=”620″ height=”360″]“Hey. I was off-balance… my leg just happened to go up. Not my fault your nuts were in the way.”
“Oh… Collison just got into my way as I was trying to chase down Hibbert…”
“Oh… I was just trying to break my fall when Rondo tripped me…”
Enough is enough, already. It’s time to send a message to Wade. Scratch that… it’s PAST time to send a message to Wade. But the obvious kick to the nuts HAS to draw a suspension. Even the league’s golden boys need to feel the sting of discipline from time to time… if for nothing else to maintain the facade that the league isn’t happily looking the other way again when it comes to Wade.
At some point, the coincidences stop being coincidences, and the repeated incidents become a pattern. Wade isn’t the unlucky soul around whom other players run the unfortunate risk of hitting the ground. He puts them there. Intentionally. Unnecessarily. It’s time to put a stop to it.
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