Getty LeBron James #23 of the Los Angeles Lakers celebrates after a play against the Utah Jazz.
LeBron James joining the Chicago Bulls?
Say it ain’t so!
Apparently that almost became a thing according to recently retired Miami Heat and future Naismith Hall of Famer, Dwyane Wade.
Appearing on the Knuckleheads Podcast with Quentin Richardson and Darius Miles, Wade said he and LeBron James contemplated joining the Chicago Bulls back in 2010.
Dwyane Wade has said this before. Multiple times.
And yet the recently retired shooting guard is making headlines again for repeating that he and LeBron James both seriously considered joining the Bulls in 2010.
Wade spoke with Darius Miles and Quentin Richardson of The Knuckleheads Podcast on Wednesday and said that the pair’s decision came down to Miami and Chicago.
“Chicago was on the top of both our lists,” he said. “Miami was on the top. We looked at New York.”
Wade, of course, didn’t join the Bulls. He, James and Chris Bosh – who Wade admitted the Bulls probably didn’t have room for and was one of the deciding factors in free agency – teamed up in Miami and won two championships in 2012 and 2013.
Wade eventually returned home in 2016, though he was a shell of himself in 60 games, averaging 18.3 points on 43 percent shooting and 31 percent from beyond the arc. The rebuilding Bulls, who had just traded Jimmy Butler, opted to buy out Wade prior to the 2017-18 season.
During the preseason of Wade’s lone year in Chicago, he spoke in length about this exact same topic, telling reporters “(Chicago) is a place I wanted to play. It was a place LeBron also loved. We loved the city of Chicago. It’s a great market as well. Obviously, the sunny sun of Miami is great, too. We had two great choices. It pretty much boiled down to what we felt we could build.”
LeBron James’ lasting legacy will probably be how he managed his brand and how he was able to fit on other teams while taking shorter term contractual deals.
His move to the Miami Heat symblozied that the most. “I think when he got to certain levels, he was like, ‘oh, okay, I thought I was going hard, I gotta go this hard,’” Quentin Richardson told me on the Scoop B Radio Podcast.
“And I heard him say something like: ‘I thought I had been going hard, then when I started playing with LeBron, I saw how hard he worked, so I had to start doing this.’
Wade also let LeBron be LeBron. “So the thing about Dwyane is that he’s that type of person that he’s able to be humble enough to see that, ‘it’s also another level I could go to,” Richardson told the Scoop B Radio Podcast.
James would later return back to the Cavaliers, the team that drafted him in 2014 and won a championship with the Cavs in 2016. But while ‘Bron and D-Wade were in Miami, they got busy.