Miami Heat is not getting the respect it deserves and this opening-game loss won’t help | Opinion
Was it real? Did the Miami Heat really win the Eastern Conference and reach the NBA Finals last season? Or did we imagine it all and then the bubble burst and now it’s back to reality?
The buildup to the new season makes one almost wonder because the Heat has accrued little of the respect that is typically bestowed upon a league finalist that fell only two wins short of a championship. Such credit normally carries over into the next season.
Nope. Not for Miami it certainly did not.
Quite the opposite. It’s as if skeptical gambling lords and basketball fans, who place bets and set odds, are closer to calling last season’s Heat Finals run a fluke, not a blueprint likely to be repeated.
Wednesday night might have helped a smidgen. Instead it only feeds the narrative that Miami might be hard-pressed to do again what it just did.
A 113-107 loss to also-ran Orlando in the regular-season opener to the Heat’s 33rd season was not the curtain call coach Erik Spoelstra had in mind. This wasn’t the playoff bubble in Orlando, the common site that was Miami’s magic kingdom in a playoff run that ended a mere 73 days earlier. This was the Magic’s home game before actual fans, albeit only one-fifth of capacity because of continuing COVID-19 restrictions.
At least the game was played, without pandemic-related calamity. Earlier Wednesday, the Houston-Oklahoma City game had to postpone when the Rockets could not provide the league-required eight available players after COVID-19 testing.
Bam Adebayo had 25 points and 11 rebounds. Four other Heaters were in double-figures — including Goran Dragic’s 20 off the bench and Jimmy Butler’s 19. Rookie Precious Achiuwa (eight points in 14 minutes) showed flashes. But too much else went wrong, including 22 turnovers and newcomer Mo Harkless’ three points in his debut as a new starter.
Adebayo said before the game this season is about, “How we get to that level of possibility where we can raise that [championship] trophy.”
Miami’s next parry at the skeptics who doubt that’ll happen — the next step in the climb to re-earn the respect not given — will come in the Christmas Day home opener, a matinee vs. Zion Williamson and New Orleans.
It might be a season-long process — the Heat needing to prove to doubters that last fall was not a fluke, and that maybe the road out of the East still runs through Miami?
It’s a tough sell, that.
It is even though one could argue that Miami might be reigning champion today, not a Game 6 loser to LeBron James and the L.A. Lakers, had Adebayo and Dragic not missed critical time with injuries during the title run.
If Miami requires the incentive of disrespect, they’ve got plenty, put it that way.
The second-place finisher in the one-of-a-kind 2019-20 season is tied for the seventh betting favorite to begin this season, and only fifth in the East.
Brooklyn, with a healthy Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving, and Milwaukee and Giannis Antetokounmpo, are East co-favorites, while Boston and Philadelphia also are judged better than the Heat. (You might recall Miami vanquished Milwaukee and Boston in the 2020 playoffs en route the Finals).
Fittingly, Bucks-Celtics had the national TNT stage Wednesday night, not the East-champ Heat.
That’s because doubters pigeonhole the Heat as the ideal built-for-the-bubble team that won’t shoot as well back in road arenas.
Skeptics wonder if Butler can duplicate his Superman effort and results seen in the postseason.
If Tyler Herro can do the same.
If Adebayo, enriched with a maximum contract, has a higher gear in him.
If Dragic, now 34 and coming off a foot injury, will show signs of slowing or be the spark he was again Wednesday night.
This is the roster that must do it again, with no James Harden riding in on a gilded horse in a mega-trade as was speculated. And, now, with no Giannis looming as a 2021 whale of a free-agent target after his mega-extension in Milwaukee.
It seemed almost miraculous that Miami reached the NBA Finals barely over two months ago.
The climb feels steeper now.
And it did before Wednesday night’s regular-season opener slipped away in the same city that was Miami’s magic kingdom in that bubble ride just 10 weeks earlier.
This story was originally published December 23, 2020 at 9:40 PM.
