Dwyane Wade reveals how Kobe's 5th title fueled Heat superteam

02/28/2025 08:46 PM

The Miami Heat didn’t have a whole lot of talent surrounding star Dwyane Wade during the team’s brief stint in the 2010 NBA Playoffs. The Heat bowed out to the Boston Celtics in five games in the opening round, and no player outside Wade averaged more than 10.8 points per contest in that best-of-seven series.

Not long after his Heat got eliminated, he watched Los Angeles Lakers guard Kobe Bryant win his fifth championship in the NBA. According to the Heat legend, witnessing Bryant capture his second consecutive title in 2010 fueled Miami to improve in a major way that offseason and form a superteam.

Dwayne Wade talks about how Kobe winning his 5th championship made him and Lebron create a Superteam pic.twitter.com/MxajJQ8uPq

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“And so Kob go get two championships back to back,” Wade said of the Lakers icon. “How we gon’ compete with that? So, we gotta do our thing, and whatever our thing is, is what it became to be. I remember Kob — I said this before — I remember Kob went down and grabbed that. It’s a video of Kob when they win the second one, the ball goes all the way down, pretty much coming to the camera. And Kob run down, he grab it. He got his one hand in the air, he smiling at the camera. I turned that f—— TV off. Right then I was pissed, ’cause now Kob has five championships. I got one. Bron ain’t got none. He is leaving us in the pack, and we competitive. So I’m sitting there like, ‘No, this summer gotta be different.'”

Bryant won the final NBA title of his pro career in 2010. The Lakers bested a Celtics team led by stars Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, Ray Allen and Rajon Rondo in the NBA Finals in what was maybe one of the better championship series in recent memory. It took seven games for the Lakers to come out on top, and Los Angeles won the deciding Game 7 by just four.

But in the 2011 NBA Playoffs, the Lakers got swept by the Dallas Mavericks in the second round, and the guard didn’t advance past the second round again after the 2012 NBA Playoffs.

While Bryant’s days of stacking up titles came to an end by the time the Heat formed a superteam, Wade along with forward LeBron James and big man Chris Bosh dominated the NBA during their four seasons as a trio.

Two of Miami’s three titles in franchise history came when James, Wade and Bosh were teammates, and the Heat won back-to-back titles just like the Bryant-led Lakers did. The Heat beat the Oklahoma City Thunder in the 2012 NBA Finals and then eliminated the San Antonio Spurs in the following year’s championship series.

On top of that, Miami reached four NBA Finals in a row with the trio in the fold.

In hindsight, fans of the Heat seemingly should be happy that Bryant won his fifth title as a member of the iconic Lakers organization in 2010, as it inspired the Heat to form a superteam that helped carve out the most successful era in the history of the franchise.

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