Like a Bosh should be a good thing

Remember Major League 2? Remember how Ricky “Wild Thing” Vaughn played by Charlie Sheen showed up to training camp wearing a suit, a hot blond agent/trophy girlfriend and an arsenal of awful pitches he had given names to as some sort of attempt at branding. I mean who could forget Jack Parkman naming one of the pitches the master-baiter, (OK go ahead and laugh at that word) later changed to the humiliator? Eventually, Vaughn went back to “Wild Thing”, striking out Parkman with good ol’ number 1, the Terminator. The same thing happened to Willy Mays Hays, who tried to become a power hitter and it of course failed, leading Hays, played brilliantly by Pittsburgh Steelers Head Coach Mike Tomlin, to revert to his old base stealing ways. The moral of Major League 2 is that change isn’t always a good thing.

You could say the same thing about portions about the Miami Heat’s first season. I’m not going to write the same tired essay about what went wrong and pee all over what ended up being one of the most eventful and entertaining season for any team in NBA history. I’m a solutions based guy. I will say though, Chris Bosh’s season specifically has some Wild Thing Vaughn & Willie Mays Hays to it. There’s a guy who was told by everyone that he had to become a tough post players who rebounded and blocked shots and everything else that wasn’t his strong suit (though his rebounding number in Toronto were awesome). But being a low post threat hasn’t ever been Bosh’s strong suit, like power hitting was never Willie Mays Hays’ strong suit or like the master-baiter er… the humiliator was Wild Thing’s strong suit.

In the midst of Bosh’s season, another guy with a similar skill set turned his perception around by simply being the player he was most comfortable being. Dirk Nowitzki is now the model for how a guy like Bosh should model himself after. Keep in mind I’m not suggesting Bosh can become as lethal an offensive weapon as Dirk and frankly he doesn’t have to be because he has LeBron and Dwayne Wade on his team. Bosh is a couple inches shorter than Dirk and doesn’t quite have the range as Hasselhoff’s number one fan. But Bosh does have a killer mid range game that opens up the rest of his offense. He should stick to that. And if he does choose to work on a post game, do what Dirk did and work on perfecting a fadeaway or an offense balance jumper that no one can stop. If we are to assume that LeBron is working on his post game this season and Wade already has a solid post game, Bosh may be best suited to become the best mid range option in the NBA not named Dirk.

No one had to change his game last season as much as Bosh. He went from being the first option on a team for his entire career to being the third option and maybe the most scrutinized player in the league depending on what LeBron is doing on any given week. This is a guy that averaged 24 points and 11 rebounds a game with PER of 25 two seasons ago, so asking him to take such a large step back proved to be a pretty big task psychologically. But if he can continue to work on what his mid range game lefty game, he could turn himself in to one of the most efficient players in the league.

By the way, best part of Major League 2isn’t Sheen or Mike Tomlin’s tour de force performance of Willie Mays Hays, it’s obviously Eric Bruskotter’s performance as Rube Baker.