Foremost, he said James spoke from the heart on ESPN about a desire to get away from the villain's hat he wore last season, a discussion the two had after coming up two victories shy against the Dallas Mavericks in the NBA Finals.
"I said, 'Let me look like the mean one. You play the way you play,' " Wade related. "We did talk about that. We were on vacation we talked about that. We didn't run away from losing the Finals. We looked at it and said, 'Why did we lose? How did we lose? What can we do different? How can we be better as leaders?'
"And the one thing I kind of wanted for LeBron is to get back to being LeBron, and not trying to be somebody that everybody wanted him to be, in a sense. He seems to understand that, as well."