Lifting spirits and a city, Heat beats Bucks again to continue pandemic playoff run | Opinion
Nobody was believing in Miami yet, or ready to write off Milwaukee. One game wouldn’t flip the narrative, not even one as convincing as the Heat’s 115-104 victory against the Bucks to begin this NBA Eastern Conference second-round series.
That is why Milwaukee, after the league’s best regular season, was a solid 5-point favorite entering Game 2 on Wednesday night in the Orlando bubble. It’s why ESPN’s Basketball Power Index gave the Bucks a 69 percent likelihood of winning the series even after the Game 1 stumble.
Well, how about now?
Anybody believing in the Heat yet? Maybe just a little?
Miami 116, Milwaukee 114.
And even more important score:
Miami is 2-0 entering Game 3 on Friday night.
Goran Dragic led the Heat with 23 points after scoring 27 in Game 1, to offset Jimmy Butler’s quiet 13-point night after he was scorched for 40 on Monday. But it was Butler’s two clutch free throws with no time left that decided it. That and an avalanche of 17 3-pointers, four each by Dragic and Jae Crowder.
Bucks superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo rebounded from an off Game 1 to score 29 on Wednesday, but it was his foul on Butler in the last second that ended it.
Milwaukee’s Kris Middleton had said after the Game 1 loss, “I don’t think anybody on our team has any doubt whether we will win this series.”
Well, how about now?
The playoffs, in the NBA more than in any other sport it seems, are when the reputations of players and teams are shaped for better or ill. This is where legends are defined, or denied. This is the place, the time, when athletes rise to be seen as clutch or hear whispers that they choked.
It is why Bucks coach Mike Budenhozer said of Jimmy Butler’s 40-point Game 1 for Miami: “He had one of those playoff moments.”
This is when great players lift their teams, or let them down.
The sample size here is small. It offers a peek, not proof. Milwaukee roaring back to still take this series would not shock a lot of people.
But what we are seeing, right now, is Antetokounmpo, the Greak Freak, failing to meet the moment presented him. It was a moment made more urgent by last year’s playoffs, when Kawhi Leonard and Toronto shrunk Antetokounmpo in the Eastern finals.
Giannis was league MVP last year and is favored to win again this season. He already has been named Defensive Player of the Year.
His storybook destiny would have been to mint his legend and stake his claim to being the best player in the sport by leading Milwaukee to its first NBA championship since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s 1971.
Instead, we are seeing Butler and Dragic and Bam Adebayo all looking like the better players in this series thus far as they lift Miami — team and city. And lift spirits, too.
The Heat advancing in the postseason for the first time since 2016 and now legit-gunning to reach the Eastern finals for the first time since 2014 — this is the most exciting sports South Florida has had in six months, since the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic shut everything down.
Sure, it’s in a bubble before digital fans instead of real ones (Dwyane Wade was one Wednesday night). And after a delayed, truncated season whose eventual champion will carry an asterisk.
No matter. The Heat is reminding us what big games felt like. Why we love sports, and what we’d missed for most of this year like no other.
The Heat on a playoff run doesn’t make real life disappear. The ongoing pandemic, our political divide, racial in justice, social unrest — those things are omnipresent, the NBA players’ own social-message uniforms mirroring much of that. Sports does have the power, though, to make real life go away for a minute.
Right now, for South Florida, the Miami Heat holds that power.
To make us cheer. To bring us cheer.
