The Miami Heat, having just signed both Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade, are still considered the favorites by many to win the LeBron James sweepstakes. (Did you hear? It's on ESPN at 9 p.m. ET tonight. Live!)
But FOX Sports' Jeff Goodmon threw a pretty spicy wrinkle into the free agency mix this afternoon, tweeting that the Heat made a five-year, $27-30 million offer to Mike Miller, with "a deadline tonight."
Update: A source with knowledge of the negotiations disputes the report, telling FanHouse an offer has not been made.
The immediate reaction to that is to assume that either the Heat are giving up on landing LeBron or that they're trying to bluff him into taking less money. There's also the possibility that they're setting up Miller to be a backup plan, but offering him the deal before LeBron makes his decision seem like a backwards way of doing that.
Of course, a follow-up tweet by Goodmon throws much of that out the window -- his source claims that Miami told Miller that "the team is 'confident' LeBron is coming."
So, um, what? Yes, great question. First things first, the money. Mike Prada does a great job of breaking it down at SBNation, which, by subtracting the cash from Michael Beasley, Mario Chalmers and James Jones' leftover cash, gives the Heat -- based on the new salary cap numbers -- $50,371,371 to play with when it comes to Bosh, Wade, LeBron and Miller.
Estimating the same $5 million for Miller that Prada threw out (which is probably right -- if it's a standard rising deal, $5.2 million is probably the ceiling for what Miller would make in the first year, bringing it to $29 million for the course of the deal), the Heat then have $45,371,371 to work with.
Cut that into thirds and it means that LeBron, Bosh and Wade would all make $15.1 million each, provided they were all willing to split the money down the middle to form a "Super Team." Of course, the willingness to set themselves up for a whole lot of winning and maybe a South Beach party or two would set them each back $1.4 million per season on their "new team" max deals.
Obviously for LeBron -- since Bosh/Wade are already on board -- that means tacking on even more money lost if he leaves Cleveland, which is something a well-connected source told FanHouse seemed unlikely to happen (primarily because of the previously discussed cash that would be left on the table.)
Two more points worth noting: One, that the Heat are still trying to move Beasley, which isn't surprising, but if it happened, it makes things infinitely easier for the Heat to land James. And secondly, in case it wasn't obvious, Miller could make much more money with someone like the Knicks.
But if he took the cash and headed to the Big Apple, he wouldn't be joining the regular season version of the Dream Team. Then again, that's the same decision facing LeBron.
source:- http://nba.fanhouse.com
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