It's a common turn of phrase when an NBA player provides a singularly dominant performance - puts on a show.
If LeBron James scores 50 points in a game, for example, you'll hear a lot about "The LeBron Show" in Miami from sports pundits that night or the next day.
This, however, has nothing to do with dominant performances, or really basketball at all.
Dwyane Wade hasn't been putting on many shows this season, due to a mix of uneven performances and a couple missed games. It seems though, between the offseason and the couple off nights, he's used his free time figuring out.... how to put on a show.
The literal Dwyane Wade show will become a real thing, as the Miami Heat star has sold a sitcom to Fox, apparently with a biographical bent as it will detail the lives of "an NBA star" and "his two young sons" whom he receives full custody of. Which, well, is more or less Wade's life.
The show supposedly has a working title of "Three The Hard Way," which, to its credit, absolutely sounds like a Fox sitcom.
"I will be involved. I'll be very involved," Wade told the AP.
The project is described by the AP this way:
"Wade and Mike Tollin, one of the executive producers, sold the project to Fox earlier this year. Watkins was brought on board over the summer. ... [the plot is described as]: 'no matter how misinformed, misguided, or unfit Team Wade may be, they have a trump card that can't lose. It's called love'."
"All the chips are there," Wade said. "Now hopefully everybody eats."
I'm not entirely sure what Wade means by that, but it probably played well with television executives.
Wade and his high school girlfriend were married from 2002-2010, though he filed for divorce way back in 2007. He was granted sole custody of his sons in 2011.
Wade has said he wants the combination of a focus on humour with sometimes difficult subject matter to echo that of "The Cosby Show". But on first glance it actually sounds more like, "Hangin' with Mr Cooper," a mid-90s sitcom that starred comedian Mark Curry as an ex-NBA player who would often mentor the high school basketball players he was now coaching in Oakland, California. The show would occasionally broach serious subjects.
And – not to editorialise too egregiously – "Hangin' with Mr Cooper" was a great show. So if Dwyane Wade's project can match that kind of quality (to say nothing of the incredibly highly regarded "Cosby Show") he'll surprise a lot of people.
