“I’m not presumptuous enough to think you should always win. But you had that team. We were that team.”
That’s what Erik Spoelstra, wistfully overlooking Biscayne Bay, told then-SI senior writer Lee Jenkins in 2014 after the end of the Big Three era in Miami. For the previous four years, South Florida had been the center of the basketball universe. From the moment LeBron James decided to join the Heat on July 8, 2010, he, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh formed one of the most thrilling, polarizing, exhausting, and gripping trios in all of sports.