Online Wagering Community Split over Heat’s Offseason Moves. The biggest story in the online wagering community for much of the offseason has been the Miami Heat’s offseason moves. In case you’ve been living in a cave in Waziristan for the past six months or are a North Korean prison you’ve surely heard the news that nearly brought the world of professional basketball to a standstill.
It helps that July and August are such slow points in the news cycle so just about anything that happens in that time frame becomes blown out of proportion, but it’s almost impossible to exaggerate the impact that the Heat’s signing of LeBron James and Chris Bosh –and the resigning of Dwayne Wade- will have on the NBA.
Quite simply, the Heat has had the most significant free agent off-season in the history of professional sports.
Three plus years ago the Boston Celtics took the online wagering world by storm when it brought in, what was at that time, the greatest class of offseason acquisitions in the history of the sport. But an aging Kevin Garnett, a hobbled Ray Allen and Paul Pierce in his prime can’t hold a candle to the Heat’s crop of superstars.
LeBron is the greatest basketball player on the planet, Wade is among the top three in the world and there is no better power forward at the moment anywhere on this mud ball than Chris Bosh. Never before have so many of the world’s best players –and top tier NBA talent- been on the same roster and this has many people who engage on online wager activity a bit unsettled.
There are many in the online wagering community who abhor the offseason moves and think it’s unsporting to do what the Heat did. However, the fact of the matter is, love it or hate it, the Heat did what every other franchise would love to do, but wasn’t lucky enough or smart enough to be able to pull it off.
Even basketball greats like Magic Johnson have weighed in, criticizing the decision and questioning the competiveness of such a move. But as great as Johnson was he also had the luxury of playing with two fellow hall of famers and a half dozen all stars. Do you think he’d be singing the same tune if he had been forced to play his career with the likes of Jason Kapono and Chris Quinn?
Love it or hate it, the Heat’s off season moves will at least make the NBA online wagering season that much more interesting in the year ahead.