Column: Miami Heat schadenfreude extends beyond LeBron

People often give the Heat’s other star — Dwyane Wade — a free pass. They shouldn’t. In the past three months, Dwyane Wade has thrown an elbow in an All-Star Game and, worst of all, said that players should get paid to play for the United States in the Olympics. The former could be excused as an accident, but the latter is, well, just so LeBron-like for its mixture of cluelessness and selfishness. We could perhaps forgive these recent indiscretions if Dwyane Wade was not an epic flopper also. Google “Dwyane Wade flop” for some truly inspiring acting. He is also a reverse flopper: jumping into a defender and getting the benefit of the doubt from referees is a signature Dwyane Wade move.

Chris Bosh often gets criticized for his poor performance. This criticism strikes me as a bit unfair: His overrated status is not his fault, and his poor performance is actually a source of joy for those who hate the Heat. That said, he ditched his team in a way that would be considered exceedingly rude if LeBron had not set a new standard for that sort of behavior. Chris Bosh left Toronto claiming on Twitter that he was going to play with people’s emotions about his free agency decision because he was tired of being asked what he was going to do. He claimed Canada had worse cable TV than Miami, in part because Canadian cable does not have NBA-League Pass (Canadian Cable TV does in fact have NBA League Pass). Most annoyingly, Bosh had a video crew follow him around as he was making his free agency decision. That Bosh cried in last year’s playoffs might be worthy of sympathy if he had not ditched Toronto with so little grace.

Then there is South Beach. For any newly rich person in their 20s, South Beach has its appeals: nice weather, golf courses, clubs, bars, restaurants, beaches and no state property tax. In short, it seems kind of like a permanent vacation home. It is also not known as a basketball town, or really much of a sports town in general. For South Beach to host two of the best basketball players of our generation is just a bit too much for the rest of the country to handle. The Heat winning the NBA finals would be like Vegas having the nation’s best public schools or San Diego possessing the nation’s best job market. In POL 306: Democratic Theory, I learned that John Rawls articulated a theory of justice in which the optimal distribution of goods maximizes the welfare of the least well-off. If you agree with John Rawls, then you cannot be a Heat fan because South Beach is already too charmed and the NBA Championship should be given to a less fortunate fan base.

Cleveland might be considered the anti-South Beach. It has a declining manufacturing base, a poor economy, a cursed sports history and die-hard fans. If any city deserves a championship in a major sport, it is Cleveland. LeBron was only the tip of the iceberg: Almost everything in Cleveland of value has been outsourced.

Imagine how Cleveland fans would react to a Heat championship. It would simply be too much to bear for them. As conscientious fans, we can’t root for these people to suffer and for the Heat’s bandwagon fans to taste victory.

My own ideal Heat defeat would come in three stages. First, they beat the Knicks in five, and get really cocky. Then, they dispatch the Pacers in five and their path to the finals looks inevitable, as the Bulls barely advance against the Celtics. Finally, they meet the Bulls in the NBA Eastern Conference Finals. The series would go to the seventh game. Game seven, in Chicago, would be tied with six seconds left in the fourth quarter. The final play would involve LeBron passing up the game-winning shot opportunity and passing the ball to Wade, who jumps into Joakim Noah and gets called for an offensive foul with 1.3 seconds left. Chicago inbounds the ball to Luol Deng on alley-oop in which he dunks over Dwyane Wade. Justice prevails.

Though this particular outcome is unlikely to come to fruition, the odds are against the Heat to win the NBA title. Watching them falter will be entertaining.