The story behind Heat’s new playoff campaign. Also, Dragic on the postseason and Butler
There are no real home playoff games this season, but the Miami Heat still has a new playoff campaign that it hopes will help make a difference beyond the basketball court.
The team announced Thursday that “United in Black” is the new postseason theme.
The Heat opens the playoffs with a first-round best-of-7 series against the Indiana Pacers that begins with Game 1 on Tuesday at 4 p.m., with a fresh playoff campaign “as part of the team’s ongoing initiative to fight for social justice and take the next step in its pledge supporting the Black Lives Matter movement.”
“We’re excited about it,” Heat chief marketing officer Michael McCullough said. “We just saw an opportunity to use the playoffs as a platform to continue the dialogue around social justice and and racial inequity. For us, it makes perfect sense with this whole color theme we started so long ago. It’s a nice opportunity for us to use the platform to keep talking about this.”
The Heat will wear its Icon Edition Miami Black uniforms as both the home and road team as much as possible throughout the playoffs. The home team gets to pick which uniform it will wear and the road team then chooses a contrasting uniform, with the Heat planning to use its black uniform as its home uniform and when permitted as the road team.
As part of the campaign, Heat players will also wear “United in Black” shooting shirts during pregame warmups and throughout the game. The shooting shirts will be available to the public for sale as part of the team’s new Black Lives Matter Collection of Court Culture Apparel, with proceeds benefiting Black Girls Code, Health in the Hood and the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition.
While the team competes at Disney, the front of AmericanAirlines Arena will include a Black Lives Matter banner.
“This is one of those opportunities as a sports franchise where you can use your platform to create so much good and so much awareness,” McCullough said. “For me, using our playoffs to help support the pledge and our Black Lives Matter movement commitment that we made, it’s going to have a special place because it gives us the opportunity to impact change, to engage the fan base and to give back all at once.”
The Heat has used a team color as the center of its playoff campaign since 2004, from “White Hot” to “Red Zone” to “Back in Black” over the years. And even though the Heat will be playing its postseason games in front of an empty arena at Disney’s Wide World of Sports Complex in Lake Buena Vista, McCullough hopes fans still show their support for the team and the movement by wearing black during the postseason run.
“This is something our fans have been supportive of since 2004,” McCullough said. “I think they’re going to respond really positively to support the team by wearing black, but also support the message and movement at the same time.”
This is all just a continuation of the Heat’s social justice pledge. The organization has pledged to donate to organizations that are working to eradicate racial inequality, support education initiatives that serve the Black community and help more Black students attend college, provide opportunities to Black students with its company mentoring and internship programs, support voter registration initiatives that make it easier for more people to vote, give all Heat staff paid time off on Election Day to vote, designate Juneteenth as a permanent paid holiday for employees of the organization and partner with Black-owned businesses in the community.
“As soon as there is no need for protests because everybody feels like everybody is on common ground, that’s when enough is enough,” McCullough said. “I don’t think we’ve reached that point as a country yet. For us to use our platform and our players and our coaches and our leadership to get behind this platform, we made an organizational decision and we know it’s not going to be popular with everyone. But that’s the decision that we made. As long as there’s a need for us to use our platform and our voices, we’re going to do that. Clearly, that is still the case right now.”
DRAGIC ON THE BUBBLE AND BUTLER
How will Heat players and coaches treat the playoffs in the NBA bubble? Just like they would under normal circumstances.
“Jimmy stays in his room and Udonis [Haslem too],” Heat guard Goran Dragic said during an appearance on the latest episode of Adrian Wojnarowski’s ESPN podcast. “ We don’t hang out with other players. We’ve already prepared ourselves for the playoffs. If you win, you stay. If you lose, you go home. So we’re not here to hang out or to play cards with them or to talk to them. No, this is business for us. We want to win a championship and that’s how we’re going to do it. It’s normal for us. Even [Erik Spoelstra] is talking about it. For us, it’s hunger games. Hunger games — whoever wins, that team is going to eat basically.”
As for Heat All-Star Jimmy Butler, Dragic called him “one of my favorite teammates”
Dragic said of Butler during the 44-minute podcast: “For me, I even talked to some guys. I said, ‘How did that even come out with the media or players that Jimmy is a bad guy?’ I don’t know. If I’m honest, I really don’t know. He wants to win.
“Jimmy is one of those players that he’s going to call you out. If you’re not doing your job, he’s going to call you out. As professional players, we need that. He’s our leader. Everybody knows that. It’s nothing personal. He’s here to win and we’re here to win. Maybe other organizations with those young fellas, they couldn’t handle that. I think they’re wrong. Everybody needs to be vulnerable and everybody needs to accept criticism, too. ... That’s how Jimmy operates and I love him for that.”
▪ With the Heat’s first-round playoff matchup already set and no real home-court advantage at Disney, Miami held out a chunk of its rotation players against the Pacers on Friday as a precaution.
For Miami, Bam Adebayo (right knee soreness), Butler (right foot soreness), Jae Crowder (right knee bruise), Dragic (left ankle soreness), KZ Okpala (personal reasons) and Gabe Vincent (right shoulder sprain) did not play.
The Pacers also held out some of their key players, with Victor Oladipo, Myles Turner and T.J. Warren unavailable Friday. Jeremy Lamb (torn ACL) and Domantas Sabonis (left foot plantar fasciitis) remained out.
This story was originally published August 14, 2020 at 11:22 AM.
