LeBron, Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh in Miami plus nine Heat scrubs?

LeBron James is headed to Miami to join Dwayne Wade’s Heat team, and Chris Bosh will be joining them, so claims respected NBA analyst Stephen A. Smith – and if true, it’ll make for the most interesting roster in modern team sports, for more reason than one. First, the obvious: three of the NBA’s top five superstars all on one team, in a sport in which only five players take the court at a time, would make for an Olympic-like level of dominance whenever all three are on the court together. The second unique angle would be that even with the moves the Heat have already made (essentially forfeiting its first round draft pick, giving away Daequan Cook, etc.), signing LeBron and Bosh while keeping Wade would leave the Heat (which oh by the way, currently has a grand total of two players on its roster) in a salary cap position in which it would have to put the rest of its roster together by offering mostly minimum salaries to already-wealthy veterans who are so desperate to win a championship with the Wade-LeBron-Bosh trifecta that they’d be willing to sign for millions of dollars less than they could get elsewhere.

However, it wouldn’t be the first time in recent history that an NBA team successfully built a veteran roster on the cheap around a small handful of superstars. In fact, the Pat Riley wrote the guidelines for how to do so himself four years ago when he assembled a cast of talented players with something to prove to complement Wade and Shaquille O’Neal – and won an NBA championship in the process. Sure, it only worked for two seasons before it fell apart, but that was because Shaq ran out of gas; Wade, Bosh, and LeBron are all still young enough that the Heat would be looking at a window of at least five seasons in which it would automatically be a contender.

For another team, signing Wade, LeBron, and Bosh with no money left for the other nine roster spots might be too big of a risk; after all, teams typically have eight or nine players in rotation per game, and that’s before you factor in injuries. But for Riley, who has proven that capable of filling in the vacant roster spots with role players who are at a career stage in which they’re more interested in winning championship rings than buying diamond rings, the decision is an easy one to make if he really is staring at the possibility of being able to sign the big three as Stephen A is now claiming. The question then would become whether the Big Three would insist on Riley himself re-taking the reins as coach. Then again, that seemed to work out just fine the last time.