King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Dwyane Wade shines even when he makes mistakes, Dirk Nowitzki makes mistakes even when he shines, and the Heat are NBA champs.

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June 21, 2006 | How different might our impression of Dwyane Wade have been in the next few years if Jason Terry's three-pointer at the buzzer had gone in Tuesday night?

Terry's shot, a good look that would have sent Game 6 of the NBA Finals to overtime had it gone in, bounced out, and when Wade grabbed the rebound the Miami Heat could celebrate a 95-92 win over the Dallas Mavericks that completed a stunning comeback from 2-0 down in the series, brought the NBA title to Florida for the first time and anointed MVP Wade an unqualified hero.

Just nine seconds before, Wade, with a chance to ice the game from the free-throw line, had missed twice. For all his heroics in this series -- and make no mistake, he's the main reason the Heat are champions today -- he'd have had to live with the goat's horns if the Mavs had tied the game on Terry's shot, won in overtime, then won Game 7.

That's a lot of ifs, each more unlikely than the last, and all of that couldn't have been Wade's fault, but it would have been his misses with 9.1 seconds left in Game 6 that left the door open.

Wade made another mistake right before he missed those free throws, committing a loose-ball foul on the rebound of a Mavericks miss with 11.5 seconds to go and the Heat up by five. You concede that rebound, keep the clock running and make the Mavs earn their points.

I can tell you right now that we're all going to forget those misses -- we've already forgotten the foul -- and the next time Wade steps to the line with a big game riding on his free throws, we're all going to figure he's got them made, because he's clutch. That's how clutch works. Once we've figured out that a guy is clutch, we remember the clutch and forget the chokes.

And Wade really is clutch. Life is complicated.

I bring all this up, rather than talking about the stellar play of Alonzo Mourning and the rest of the Heat reserves and role-players -- especially Udonis Haslem and James Posey, who both played beautifully, both grabbed the crucial rebound of Wade's second missed free throw, and then both traveled, a tag-team turnover without which Terry also wouldn't have had his chance -- because I want to talk about Dirk Nowitzki.

I come not to bury Nowitzki, about whom I've written several times over the past two years that, fabulous player that he is, he's not a guy who can lead a team to a championship. It would appear that I've been right, as Nowitzki failed to step up and dominate in this series the way Wade did for Miami, and the Mavericks managed to become only the third team in Finals history to blow a 2-0 lead.

Next page: Nowitzki makes his patented crunchtime errors, but the Heat were also just a better team