The Miami Heat didn’t award Chris Bosh a five-year, $118 million contract this summer for him to be the player he was. Erik Spoelstra, Pat Riley, and company expect Bosh to be the player he used to be. And though Bosh has steadfastly maintained that he’s different now than he was as the Toronto Raptors’ franchise cornerstone, he also insists he’s better for that maturation, too.
Speaking at a promotional appearance yesterday, the Heat’s star big man expressed supreme confidence in his ability to regain the form that once made him one of the league’s top scorers. Just as important and far more impressive than such talk, though, is Bosh’s admission that his shift from Miami’s third wheel to its alpha dog will be an arduous process.
Via Shandel Richardson of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel:
“I had to play a role,” Bosh said Tuesday, speaking at an appearance at a Warren Henry Auto Group event in Kendall. “I had to play the role for the championships. I feel that I’m back to doing what comes naturally for me, which is being back in the post, being more aggressive. I’m really excited to show the city of Miami what I have…”
Just the demand night in and night out,” Bosh said. “Being in that position to where you’re expected to have a certain amount of output, to play a certain amount of minutes and score points and get a certain amount of rebounds, it’s going to be tough. But I enjoy that challenge. I’ve always enjoyed it. It’s just what comes natural to me. I’m excited. I’m looking forward to everything…”
…I was a little younger [in Toronto]. I wasn’t married. I only had one child. It was just different. Everybody wants me to go back to a person that was less than sure. I feel that my game is more rounded. I don’t want people to think that I have to resort to the past to be successful.”
Bosh was the butt of many a joke during the Heat’s LeBron James era, but the basketball intelligentsia knew that was never fair. An inevitable trade-off of his role the past four years was a decline in his scoring and rebounding numbers, dips due as much to Bosh’s individual jobs as the Heat’s system as a whole. It’s tough to maintain consistent scoring output as a jump-shooting safety valve, and it’s harder still to be a league-leading rebounder when you’re tasked with hedging hard on pick-and-rolls and banging with bodies far broader than yours.
Bosh was the league’s best “role player” the past four years, and it wasn’t even close. He was a devastating defender in Miami’s aggressive scheme and one of the NBA’s most effective floor-stretching bigs. But that identity was the implementation of a wholesale change in his game from his days with the Raptors, and one for which he didn’t receive close to as much credit as deserved.
Bosh will surely harken back to that past metamorphosis as he goes through today’s. It took time for him to become the Heat’s two-way fulcrum charged with doing grunt work, and it will take a similar amount for him to reemerge as a primary scorer. That Bosh is mature enough to understand those inevitable trials will be instrumental to eventually completing that re-transformation.
And given the individual and team-wide success he enjoyed after finishing his first necessary evolution, it would be foolish to believe Bosh won’t perfect this one, too.
What do you think?
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