Last week, Bosh informed us that he wasn’t about to wait for LeBron James to make up his mind, and now he’s reiterating his wish to be ‘the man’ for whatever team he plays for next season.
Chris Bosh isn’t waiting for some summit to determine his landing spot next season. The soon-to-be Toronto Raptors free agent is determined to chart his own course and forge his own identity apart from the star-studded field of peers also entering the open market.
“I don’t want to be mentioned as an addition to a team,” Bosh said prior to the season . “I want to be mentioned as the guy that people want to center their team around.”
“I’m not an addition. I’m a centerpiece,” he said. “I have to have that confidence in myself, and I want people to know that, because I’m not somebody that helps out. I’m the guy you get like, ‘Yo, we’re going to win a championship, you’re gonna take us there.’
“I want to hold onto that because I think every kid when they dream about playing basketball, they don’t dream about being a role player. They dream about being the man. I have that position in Toronto and to give that up and go somewhere else to be an addition would kinda defeat the purpose of my dreams.”
That’s still pretty nebulous, but we can read the tea leaves a little bit.
The fact that he doesn’t want to be mentioned as an addition to a team leads me to believe that he won’t join Dwyane Wade in Miami or LeBron in Cleveland. If he does end up playing with one of those two, it would probably be in New York or New Jersey, where the franchises are basically starting over and can build around him (and LeBron/Wade).
It would also seem to eliminate the Thunder and Lakers from contention, since he’d be seen as an “addition” to teams that already had established stars (Kevin Durant, Kobe). We could also potentially cross off the Bulls, since they already have a budding star in Derrick Rose (though Bosh would be an ideal fit there).
Perhaps the Knicks or Nets could persuade both Joe Johnson and Bosh to sign, since Bosh wants to be ‘the man,’ while Johnson doesn’t seem to crave that title.
Is it July 1 yet?
Photo from fOTOGLIF
