Still, after years of sacrificing both body and bank balance for the team, and following one of his more productive seasons in recent years that coincided with a massive spike in the salary cap, it’s obvious why Wade believed he deserved a more favorable contract from the Heat. Or at least a phone call from Heat President Pat Riley.

After 13 years, three championship rings and a wealth of franchise records, the most consequential athlete in South Florida’s history is parting ways with the Heat largely because it appears Riley and the organization thinks Wade’s sense of self-worth is more inflated than the ballooning salary cap.

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From the moment Riley landed in Miami two decades ago, he began branding the organization as a family-first operation, one that emphasizes innate characteristics like loyalty and sacrifice, which conveniently translate to marketable slogans like #heatlifer. Wade was a staunch proponent of this narrative, never more so than in 2010 when he not only brought to Miami the best player in the world, LeBron James, but left his own dollars on the table so the team could keep its adored hometown captain, Udonis Haslem.

This summer, a new generation of basketball fans learned why Riley’s reputation as basketball’s Vito Corleone is built on both rings and ruthless ambition. It’s also why the Heat might be the only team in the league whose fans revere the front office as much as they lionize the best player in its history. Well, at least that was the case entering this summer.

Riley made the Heat nationally relevant, but it was Wade and his two star friends that turned Miami into a basketball town. (That isn’t hyperbole either: South Florida was the third-highest market behind Northern California and Ohio for this year’s Finals.)

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The more we learned about the unusually close friendship between Wade and James, it became clear that their decision to join forces in 2010 had more to do with their bond than Riley dropping championship rings on a table during his pitch meeting with James. Wade brought James to Riley, not the other way around, which is also why any optimism surrounding the Heat’s dreams about Kevin Durant was rooted in little more than misplaced mythology.

The Heat seemingly alienated Wade by not making him a priority in free agency, instead chasing the Durant pipe dream. To a lot of Heat fans, this was tantamount to Riley spending the family’s paycheck on lottery tickets before paying the rent, and now they’re sitting in the street, confused and angry.

It didn’t help that this was the second consecutive year of messy public negotiations. Last summer, it culminated in Wade rapping along to Rihanna’s “B—- Better Have My Money” with his son on Snapchat — not outright singing for his dinner, but it did result in a one-year, $20 million deal, which met his salary expectations even though the length of the contract did not.

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If you want to be purely quantitative, you can make a compelling case that Riley’s hardline stance is justified given Wade’s age, injury history and the belief that it’s bad business to pay for past, rather than future, performances. All of which are sound arguments, but the egos and emotions of the characters involved are at least as pertinent.

When you look around the league to find comparable situations, the public, contentious nature of the recent negotiations between Wade and the Heat appear to be an outlier. One-team stars such as Tim Duncan, Dirk Nowitzki and Kobe Bryant have been consistently treated as priorities when their contracts were up for renewal, leading to prompt re-signings. Last week, Nowitzki, who has played five more seasons and earned greater than $60 million more than Wade, signed the same two-year, $40 million deal that was reportedly the Heat’s final offer to Wade (some reports had the Heat bumping that up to $41.5 million in the waning moments).

An obvious counter-argument, though, is whether Mark Cuban and Dallas’s loyalty toward Nowitzki actually improves their league-wide perception among players. The Mavericks’ perennial strikeouts with marquee free agents would suggest it does not move the needle.

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How much do players care about how different teams treat loyal stars at the end of their careers? How much goodwill did the Lakers buy themselves by allowing Bryant to end his career on his own terms and giving him a generous golden parachute on the way out? In terms of fan support, even if the Lakers had let Bryant leave to another team, the franchise has a multi-generational fan base to lean on and decades of success. Wade was with the Heat for almost half of the franchise’s entire existence. There is an entire generation of under-30 Heat fans whose emotional loyalties to the team started when Wade joined the team in 2003 and may even transcend loyalty to the team.

One could make a rational argument that the Heat doesn’t have a chance to compete with the Golden State Warriors regardless of what personnel moves the team makes, so it could have simply paid Wade handsomely and continued to fill seats while waiting for the landscape and balance of power to change. But that would run counter to Riley’s championship-or-bust mandate, which is also why he prioritized Durant, consequences be damned.

Emotional attachment is the driving force behind fan loyalty and the largely irrational decision to invest time and money to support a team.

Renewing season tickets that continue to climb in price, while dealing with the hassle of traffic and parking, are all decisions rooted in an emotional commitment. For my generation of Heat fans, the payoff with Wade justified the investment.

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History will show that Riley won the battle of wills. His local legacy, however, may have taken a significant hit. There’s a sizable portion of the fan base that expected Wade to retire with the Heat. How much is that worth to a team’s reputation locally and nationally? It’s almost impossible to quantify, but you only have to scroll through the plethora of angry replies to the send-off tweet Heat owner Mickey Arison’s posted after the news broke to get an idea of the local reaction.

Wade’s decision was logical, but he probably never wanted to have to make this choice. For as much as Wade will frame his return to Chicago as a homecoming, there has to be sadness in leaving behind the team and city where he had planned to spend his entire career.