Puzzled by Heat’s mediocre season? What’s unusual historically about what we’re witnessing
If it seems as though this Miami Heat team has been a perplexing puzzle over the past 16 months -- a nucleus talented enough to make an NBA Finals and yet somehow flawed enough to lose to multiple NBA doormats and several teams playing without injured superstars -- you should know this:
What the Heat is doing is historically unusual.
Aside from a handful of examples when an NBA Finals participant lost a superstar the following offseason, it is highly uncommon for a team to be as mediocre as the Heat in a large sample size both immediately preceding and following a run to the NBA Finals.
The Heat has now played 100 regular-season games since Jan. 1, 2020. Miami is 50-50 in those games: 18-20 in regular-season games prior to its run to the NBA Finals and 32-30 this season.
That type of mediocrity in a significant number of games both before and after a team makes the Finals is very rare. And it’s why several national pundits have expressed skepticism about the Heat’s chances to make another deep playoff run.
TNT’s Charles Barkley last week referred to the Heat as “bubble superstars” for making a Finals run inside the NBA’s Orlando campus during a pandemic.
“Those ballroom ballers, those don’t work with the bright lights on,” Barkley said. “Them guys who played good in the bubble, those don’t work with the bright lights on. Them ballroom bubble guys aren’t going to work in the big city.”
TNT’s Kenny Smith said Miami “isn’t the same team” as the NBA Finals qualifier, citing an energy deficit, among other things. “I don’t think they’re equipped to guard [the Milwaukee Bucks] this year,” he said.
The Heat stands at some risk of becoming the sixth team to miss the playoffs after making a Finals appearance the previous year, and the first to do it without losing a superstar in the months that followed that championship round appearance.
The five who have done that: the Bulls after Michael Jordan retired and Scottie Pippen was traded; the Lakers after Shaquille O’Neal was traded; the Heat after LeBron James departed and Chris Bosh was sidelined by blood clots; the Cavaliers after James left and the Warriors after Kevin Durant left for Brooklyn and Steph Curry and Klay Thompson were injured.
The Heat entered Wednesday standing seventh in the East. Only the top six seeds are assured playoff spots, with two others to be determined in seeding games. If the team that finishes seventh doesn’t advance past the play-in tournament, it’s not considered a playoff appearance.
“I feel like we have another level to get to,” Bam Adebayo said after Monday night’s home loss to the Bulls. “We need to get to that level fast before the season goes south. We should tap into that next level so we don’t have to do the play-in game.”
Some perspective on how unusual the Heat’s past 16 months have been historically:
▪ As a fifth seed last season, the Heat was the third-lowest seed to make an NBA Finals since 1984.
But the two teams that were lower seeds played much better the following season than the Heat has this season: the eighth-seeded Knicks who went 27-23 in a shortened season (1998-99), lost to the Spurs in the NBA Finals and went 50-32 and advanced to the Eastern Finals the following season; and the sixth-seeded 1994-95 Houston Rockets, who went 47-35, swept Orlando in the Finals and went 48-34 the next season and lost in the conference semifinals.
▪ This century - excluding the teams that lost generational superstars after appearing in a Finals - we found only four examples of something that mirrored what the Heat is now doing: following that Finals performance with a very average season.
The difference is that all four of those teams were better than the Heat during the regular season immediately preceding their Finals run; Miami went 44-29 last season. And all four of those teams lost in the first round of the playoffs the season after their Finals appearance.
Those four:
1) A Philadelphia team that went 56-26, lost to the Lakers in the 2001 Finals, then went 43-39 and lost in the first round. Allen Iverson, Eric Snow and Aaron McKie missed time with injuries, and Iverson clashed with coach Larry Brown in a season that featured Iverson’s famous “we’re talking about practice” rant.
2) An Indiana team that went 56-26 and lost to the Lakers in the 2000 Finals, then went 41-41 and lost in the first round after an offseason in which Mark Jackson left for Toronto, Dale Davis was traded for Jermaine O’Neal and Isiah Thomas was hired as coach.
3) A Dallas team that went 57-25, beat the Heat in the first year of Miami’s Big Three era in the 2011 Finals, then traded Tyson Chandler, acquired Lamar Odom in a deal that didn’t work out and went 36-30 the following season and was swept in the first round by Oklahoma City.
4) A Heat team that went 52-30, beat Dallas in the 2006 Finals, then endured an injury-plagued, unmotivated wreck of a 44-38 season, ending in a Bulls first-round sweep of Miami.
That season began with a 42-point home loss to Chicago on opening night and included Dwyane Wade missing 31 games and dealing with a torn labrum; O’Neal missing 42 games; Jason Williams missing 21 games; the Heat suspending James Posey and Antoine Walker over conditioning issues; and Pat Riley taking a leave of absence during the season to deal with hip pain and undergo surgery to remove floating chips in his right knee.
Late in that disaster of a season, Wade said “Last year was a storybook- written year and this year was the opposite.” Riley said after the season that he would demand a bigger commitment from his players.
This Heat team has lost players to injuries -- Butler has missed 17 games, Goran Dragic 21, Tyler Herro 14 and Victor Oladipo 10 games and counting - and saw Jae Crowder leave in free agency but has not endured the level of turbulence that befell that 2006-07 Heat team or the aforementioned Iverson-led 76ers. Nor was the Heat breaking in a new coach, as those 2000-01 Pacers were.
So this Heat experience is somewhat unique in recent NBA history, with the ending still to be written.
For now, though, the Heat’s resume this century - during the nation’s first pandemic in 100-plus years - includes the odd combination of an NBA Finals appearance and a .500 record in the 100 regular-season games surrounding it.
INJURY UPDATE
The Heat listed Victor Oladipo (knee soreness) as out for Wednesday’s 8 p.m. home game against the Spurs. Tyler Herro (foot soreness) and Kendrick Nunn (neck spasm) are questionable. Andre Iguodala -- who missed Monday’s loss to the Bulls with a hip injury -- and Duncan Robinson (who left Monday’s game in the second half after vomiting earlier in the evening) are not on Tuesday’s injury report.
Here’s my Tuesday Miami Dolphins piece with two NFL evaluators offering views on players in the mix for the Dolphins on need areas and what they would do.
Here’s a Tuesday pack of Miami Marlins nuggets from Craig Mish and me.
