Miami Heat: AUCH’s Weekly salute to Slam’s #WadeWednesday

The Miami Heat have had a ton of great players wear their jersey, but none more important to them than Dwyane Wade. We salute SLAM as they salute 3!

The Miami Heat jersey has been worn by the likes of Alonzo Mourning, Tim Hardaway, LeBron James, and Chris Bosh to name a few. Although all are or were great players, there have obviously been no other players to have an impact on the Miami Heat and their fans like Dwyane Wade.

While there are many ways that tribute and homage are paid to the greatest Miami Heat player of all time and his time with the team, one of the most electric is something that SLAM Magazine does with one of their social media accounts. SLAM rewind is a twitter account of the publication that salutes players, plays, and basketball from yesteryear. Every Wednesday, they do what they have aptly dubbed “#WadeWednesdays”.

Because you can never have enough DWade, I mean because how could you, we have decided to salute them for their salute. Without further ado, here is the first AUCH salute to Slam‘s #WadeWednesday.

As you can see in the above clip, Flash drove past Dominic McGuire on his way to the cup. He avoided the swiping hand of Antawn Jamison, before finishing at the hoop over JaVale McGee with the thundering one-handed jam. Amazingly enough, this was with McGee inadvertently attempting to reverse clothesline him as he finished.

This was in the 2008-09 season, but don’t marvel, it wasn’t easily recollected from the banks of thine memory. If you notice the player who daps D Wade up in the end, it appears to be Chris Quinn, who’s now ironically an assistant coach for the Miami Heat. Quinn was not only the only white dude to play for the Heat that year, but he was one of only three players on that roster shorter than Dwyane Wade.

The confirming factor in the quest to be as thorough as possible can be seen if you take notice of the player standing along the wing, it is Jamario Moon wearing the no. 8 jersey. Although there were two no. 8’s for the Miami Heat that season in Moon and Shaun Livingston, that is the only year that either of them played in Miami. The player wearing the no. 8 jersey in the following season was Carlos Arroyo, who doesn’t resemble that profile in the slightest.

The 08-09 season saw the Heat finish with a record of 43-39, enter the postseason as a fifth seed in the East, and subsequently lose to the fourth-seeded Atlanta Hawks in the first round. WoW averaged 30.2 points, 7.5 assists, 5 rebounds, 2.2 steals, and 1.3 blocks during the regular season, while averaging 29.1 points, 5 rebounds, 5.3 assists, 0.9 steals, and 1.6 blocks during that lone playoff series.

Those were peak Dwyane Wade moments, just a master class in playing the game of basketball at the highest level. While Dwyane Wade wasn’t what he was then for the Miami Heat on last season, he still found a way to go out with a bang.

Although it is all but a pipe dream at this point, we can still hold out hope that he gets that urge to give it another go with his homey Jimmy Butler, right? We deserve to dream, but even if that dream never comes true, at least we have these to remind us of what he was able to accomplish across his illustrious career.