2. Giving Hassan Whiteside $100 million
Often times you hear people say don’t have a knee jerk reaction or don’t make impulse decisions, that’s because more often than not those decisions lead to recourse that isn’t worth what the initial action was in the first place. Sometimes this comes in the form of being plain unsatisfied, sometimes it comes in the form of being falsely sold on an idea or capability that doesn’t exist, and sometimes it’s simply just buyers remorse.
Well, all three of the above instances apply here. The Miami Heat desperately needed an anchor or a centerpiece to hang their hats on following the dismantling of the Big 3. While Dwyane Wade was there and even Chris Bosh for a short while, the team needed another dominant guy that they could call their own.
We were all under the impression that this was taking the shape and the form of a seven-foot shot-blocking behemoth that had mysteriously bounced around the league before finding himself out of it. The big question for most of us after seeing the center who is rarely to be named dominate the paint in Miami was “how in the world has he not been locked up by anyone”. We quickly found out.
The knock on he who is not to be named, the former number 21 of the Miami Heat, is that his work ethic and attitude were poor at best. When things weren’t going his way, he wouldn’t commit to being the best while it seems as though he would almost actively sabotage anything the team had going on, at least that’s how it appeared towards the end of his Heat tenure. The team eventually shipped him off to the great northwest after dealing with his gripes over the past two seasons, but the prior is why giving him the big bag in the first place was the second biggest mistake from the Heat over the last five years.