Team of the Decade: The Miami Heat
The story of the National Basketball Association is obviously a long one, one that deserves a great deal of time and attention and thought. As much as I’d love to eventually put my spin on this entire story, for right now I’m only concerned with one specific era … the 2010’s.
I’m taking on the task of writing three pieces about the two teams that will define this one particular era of the NBA, an era which experts have called a “Golden Age” of Basketball. Parts 1 and 2 will highlight what made these two teams so important to the grander story of the NBA. Part 3 will detail what would’ve happened if these two teams ever crossed paths, because the unfortunate reality is they never did, and they never will. Perhaps more importantly, Part 3 will also evaluate which team will be first remembered when discussing the 2010’s many years from now.
NBA Team of the Decade, Part 1: The Miami Heat
Origin Story
This story begins in the Summer of 2010. Perhaps more accurately it begins sometime between February 2006 and August 2008. Maybe it actually begins in 2003. But quite literally, it begins on July 8th, 2010, when a 25-year old basketball prodigy was able to carve out 75 minutes of airtime on ESPN to announce which team he would be signing with ahead of the 2010–11 NBA season.
It’s not hyperbole to suggest the LeBron James’s Decision was arguably the most important sports moment of the decade. This was not just the best basketball player in the world announcing where he would call home at the beginning of the next NBA season and the three that would follow. This was the first sports moment that played out over Twitter, with rumors and speculation circulating online in the days leading up to July 8th, and then immediate reaction pouring in after the fact. This was also a definitive, yet unexpected start to the player empowerment era of professional sports, and the singular reason why Free Agency is now treated like a bigger deal than the NBA Finals itself — there were more people watching The Decision at the time when LeBron James announced that he was “taking his talents to South Beach” than there were during 19 of the 28 NBA Finals games played between 2003 and 2007.
The broadcast of The Decision resulted in a contribution of more than $2.5 million to the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, though that monetary outcome remains a historical footnote that people like me will often try to use to spin this as a good PR move by LeBron and his camp. The Miami Heat were instantly the NBA’s equivalent of the late 90’s New York Yankees, and LeBron James had become the biggest sports villain in the world overnight. Various individuals in basketball circles began questioning the perception of LeBron as both a person and a basketball player.
An anonymous Western Conference General Manager told Sports Illustrated, “We put him on this pedestal and we believed he was fulfilling it — and now we’re idiots for believing in him. Maybe at his core he isn’t a very confident guy.” Current Ringer CEO and former ESPN columnist (and Boston Celtics fan) Bill Simmons wrote, “If LeBron James is the future of sports, then I shudder for the future.” Cleveland Cavaliers Owner Dan Gilbert wrote (in Comic Sans font) that James’s move to Miami was a “cowardly betrayal” and that the Cavaliers “WILL WIN AN NBA CHAMPIONSHIP BEFORE THE SELF-TITLED FORMER ‘KING’ WINS ONE.”
LeBron took all of the bullets (and famously turned them into mental notes), but of course he was not alone in this Miami move. One day before The Decision, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh announced on SportsCenter that they would be joining forces to play for the Heat. Two days after The Decision, the NBA’s newest Big Three appeared together for the first time at a Welcome Party in Miami.
Four years and 1 day later, after four NBA Finals appearances and two NBA Championships, it was all over.
The Main Characters
LeBron James — The near-consensus best basketball player in the world, the defending two-time league MVP, and the most polarizing man in the sports world. By the time he left Miami, LeBron had collected two more MVP trophies, his first two NBA Championship rings, and “near-consensus” had become “undisputed.” In 2016, he brought a Championship to Cleveland for the first time in 52 years.
Dwyane Wade — The 2006 NBA Finals MVP and quite possibly the 3rd best basketball player in the world at the time of the formation of the Heat Big Three. After brief (and weird) stops in Chicago and Cleveland in 2016 and 2017, Wade would return to Miami, retire a member of the Heat, and solidify himself as Miami’s most beloved athlete.
Chris Bosh — A five-time All-Star who averaged 20 points and 9 rebounds per game in seven seasons as the go-to-guy with the Toronto Raptors before joining the Miami Heat and accepting third-option status behind LeBron and Wade. Bosh would be selected as an All-Star six more times, and would have his jersey retired by the Heat in March 2019.
Pat Riley — The coolest soap opera villain who never appeared in a soap opera. Riley famously dumped a bag of his eight championship rings (won as a player, Assistant Coach, Head Coach and Executive) on the table during LeBron James’s Free Agency meeting, and encouraged LeBron to try one on. As you know, the pitch worked.
Erik Spoelstra — Entering just his third season as the Heat head coach, few analysts expected that Spoelstra would survive his first season coaching Miami’s new Big Three. Nine years later, Spoelstra is the second-longest tenured head coach in the NBA, and one of nine coaches in NBA history with two Championships and 500 regular season wins.
Ray Allen — The NBA’s three-point king (for now). Once a Heat rival as a member of the Boston Celtics, Allen joined Miami in the Summer of 2012 and would go on to hit one of the biggest shots in NBA Finals history less than a year later.
Plot
Even though LeBron suggested “not two, not three, not four, not five, not six, not seven” NBA championships at the Heat Welcoming Party, Miami did not get off to the sort of start that a dynasty that wins multiple titles typically does. After a 9–8 start to the season the Heat held a players-only meeting. Naturally, the media took this story and ran with it. ESPN’s Heat Index speculated whether Erik Spoelstra’s job was in jeopardy, if the LeBron/Wade co-Alpha Dog partnership was already fractured, if Chris Bosh could eventually be traded for multiple pieces to address a lack of depth, and if Pat Riley would relieve Spoelstra of his duties and take over on the bench. Whether it was explicitly stated or not, everyone wanted to see this Big Three burn to the ground.
What did happen was, for the first time, the Heat showed a sustained excellence that reminded everyone why Pat Riley made it a priority to clear enough cap space to sign three max deals ahead of the 2010 offseason, and why this experiment could work, initial chemistry and depth issues be damned. The Heat won 21 of their next 22 games, and 33 of their next 40, and of those 33 wins, 20 came by double-digits. In that 40 game stretch, LeBron, Wade and Bosh combined for 73 points, 23 rebounds and 13 assists per game, and the Will the ‘You Go, I Go’ Offense Work chatter quieted considerably … until June, when the Heat’s season came crashing down after blowing a 2–1 lead in the NBA Finals versus the Dallas Mavericks.
As a lifelong LeBron James fan, it pains me to admit that the best player of his generation didn’t hold up his end of the bargain in the 2011 NBA Finals. But it’s also something that cannot rightfully be avoided. It’s the one legitimate, deserved on-court black mark on his career resume — it’s one that’s explainable, and one that has probably been overblown … the reason I say this is because there is still a portion of the NBA fanbase that thinks LeBron is “not clutch” simply because he averaged 17 points per game and was totally disengaged versus Dallas — and it also makes what the Heat were able to do the following two seasons even more impressive.
The fact that Pat Riley and Mickey Arison made no major changes in the 2011 offseason speaks to the type of organization the Miami Heat are: Patient, committed, and most importantly, smart. They realized that the combination of continuity and elite talent is rare, and by not pulling the trigger on a hasty Chris Bosh trade or an unwarranted dismissal of Erik Spoelstra, the Heat proved that their commitment to winning hadn’t changed since the previous Summer.
What else hadn’t changed was the fact that Miami was the Vegas favorite to win the NBA Championship. This was the case at nearly every stage of the 2011–12 season. On December 24th, one day before the first games of the lockout shortened season tipped off, Miami was a +225 favorite to win the Championship. At the All-Star Break their odds improved to +150. By the time the Playoffs began they were a +200 favorite to hoist the Larry O’Brien Trophy. And when their Eastern Conference Finals series versus Boston began, they were +140.
No team in NBA history has dealt with the expectation of excellence like the Miami Heat did. There have been instances where teams were bigger betting favorites, or favorites for a longer period of time, but there was a different kind of pressure applied to Miami, especially during those first two seasons. There was a unique “It’s Us against The World” pressure on the Heat that is rare in sports. Yes, to some degree they brought it upon themselves — it’s not a revelation to say that this wasn’t a particularly humble bunch — but some of the vitriol directed toward this team was undeserved. Often times, anger manifested as lofty expectations.
I don’t know that there will ever be a time where there was more pressure on a team, or more pressure on a single player than there was on LeBron James and the Heat heading into Game 6 of the 2012 Eastern Conference Finals. After dropping three consecutive games to the Celtics, Miami travelled to Boston in an attempt to stave off elimination, humiliation, and undoubtedly front office ramifications. Had Miami lost Game 6, Erik Spoelstra would’ve been fired, Chris Bosh would’ve been shipped out, and LeBron James’s career may as well have ended on that very night because if he wasn’t within arm’s length of the greatest players of all-time, it would be a career deemed to be an unmitigated failure anyway.
But with Miami’s season on the line and his own career on trial, LeBron turned in a performance that now resides on the highest tier of pre-Finals postseason moments in league history:
The Heat routed the Celtics in Game 6, closed out the series back in Miami in Game 7 and then went on to defeat the young Oklahoma City Thunder in 5 games in the NBA Finals. To paraphrase 1980’s poet Glenn Frey, The Heat was on. LeBron was alone at the top of the league, the Big Three delivered Miami a title, and the Heat were slowly but surely beginning to shed their villain status.
I’m sure the most hardened LeBron/Heat Haters will disagree with the last part of that statement. To their dying day they’ll never be able to forgive a man that they’ve never met for changing job locations, but the truth is by the 2012–13 season the greatness of LeBron James and the Miami Heat had beaten down the masses to the point where all you could do, at the very least, was begrudgingly respect this group for how damn good they were. And damn were they good.
If there is a team whose single-game ceiling was higher than the 2012–13 Miami Heat, it was probably the other one that I’ve written about on Bingeable’s today. But for now, I’ll happily concede that this version of the Heat, when playing at their very best, possessed a ceiling so high that they accomplished three things that can’t be ignored:
1. As previously mentioned, they beat down the most stubborn detractors to a point where six years later, almost everybody looks back on this particular Heat team with fond memories. And again, considering what the perception of this group was in the Summer of 2010, that’s no small feat.
Here’s why it happened: Not only did the greatness of the 2012–13 Miami Heat wear people down, but the personalities of the players did as well. This was a fun and truly tight group of guys who brought unique personalities and skill-sets to the table to create something magical, and that was evident all year long. The viral Harlem Shake video and the nearly nightly post-game video bombs showed us that this group had evolved from a collection of mercenaries and misfits to a tight team of professionals who could kick ass and have a bunch of fun while doing it. And if those moments of amusement didn’t do it for ya, the good-old eye test should’ve indicated that this group had grown closer. In terms of offensive ball movement and defensive connectedness, the Heat had a collective mindset that was just as big a part of their success as their star power at the top of the roster was. That brings me to my next point …
2. The 2012–13 Miami Heat won 27 consecutive regular season games, which is the second longest single season winning streak in league history. Only six teams ever have won 20 straight games, and the Heat did so in one of the most talent-stacked eras in NBA history. Here’s an even more impressive statistical nugget: From February 1st to May 22nd — this includes the final 40 games of the 2012–13 regular season, two full Playoff rounds and one game of the Eastern Conference Finals — the Heat steamrolled to a 46–4 record, a run that broke the record for the best 50 game stretch of basketball in NBA history (this mark was eventually tied by the 2015–16 Golden State Warriors, who started their season 46–4).
3. To cap their season off, the Heat defeated the Spurs in the 2013 NBA Finals, winning Games 6 and 7 on their home court in dramatic fashion. Even though it wasn’t the most dominant end to their most dominant season, it proved that the team that found ways to lose early on in their tenure together had now found ways to win. It also proved, once and for all, that all of the shit this team got in 2010 was worth it, and that Harvey Dent’s prophecy in The Dark Knight was actually flipped … the Heat could have either died the NBA’s most notorious villains, or lived long enough to become the league’s most unlikely heroes.
Maybe they weren’t exactly heroes, but they came close enough. More important than heroics, the 2010–14 Miami Heat were innovators, and most importantly, they were champions. And in the NBA, that’s what matters the most.
