There aren't many certainties in sports, but if there is one, you can feel pretty secure in the bet that the team that ends up winning the championship will play, in some fashion, the "nobody believed in us" card. It's not a total misrepresentation. In the social media era, no matter how great you are, you're always going to be able to find doubters, contrarians, haters.
For instance, there were certainly people who said LeBron James wasn't the same player anymore, or that Anthony Davis didn't have championship DNA, and that by extension, the Los Angeles Lakers weren't true contenders. But nobody in their right mind actually believed that. No right-thinking person looked at the Lakers with any sort of objective eye and thought, "yeah, that team's not a threat." They might have thought they were a flawed team, a vulnerable team, but not an irrelevant one. No way.
The Miami Heat, on the other hand?
That's a different story.
I'm not going to say nobody believed this Heat team could make it as far as it did, but if you exclude people within the organization, there weren't many. I called them a sleeper to emerge from the Eastern Conference back in September, but I believed much of that potential stemmed from their capacity to trade for Chris Paul, or some other All-Star-level player next to Jimmy Butler.
When that didn't happen, I (obviously wrongly) eliminated Miami from my list of contenders. I was not alone. They were a No. 5 seed, a position from which no team in NBA history had ever advanced to the Finals.
Indeed, a lot of this Miami team's story can, and should, be told through the prism of underestimation. Nobody thought rookie Tyler Herro would be this good this soon. Nobody thought Bam Adebayo would turn into an All-NBA-level point-center in his first year as a full-time starter. Nobody thought Goran Dragic was going to turn into Steve Nash in the playoffs. Nobody thought Jae Crowder would shoot like Klay Thompson through three rounds. Nobody thought undrafted Duncan Robinson would make 270 3-pointers -- at an ungodly 47 percent clip -- in a regular season that was cut a month short.
I remember sitting at Jimmy Butler's introductory press conference and listening to Pat Riley call Butler a "top 10 player," and I have to admit, I thought that was an exaggeration. It wasn't. I remember Riley saying "it's put up or shut up time" as he spoke of the Heat as legitimate contenders, and again, I thought that was an exaggeration. It wasn't.
And now here I am again, skeptical about the Miami Heat's true title-contending prospects moving forward. I suppose I don't learn lessons very well, and there's no doubt I'm a total buzzkill taking this position. This team just had a truly magical run and here I am throwing shade before they even get out of the bubble. But I keep going back to something a scout told me earlier in the playoffs: "I wouldn't put too much stock in anything we've seen in the bubble. The circumstances are so unique."
Listen, if what we saw in the bubble is entirely accurate, Jamal Murray is an MVP candidate, the Bucks and Clippers are frauds and the Heat are the best team in the Eastern Conference. But let's really think about this. Yes, the Heat beat the Bucks, but that series was as much about Milwaukee's flaws as it was Miami's strengths, and the Bucks will be extremely motivated to address those flaws this offseason with Giannis Antetokounmpo's free agency hovering over the franchise. Chris Paul to Milwaukee feels like a real option and if that happens the Bucks are the clear best team in the East.
Beyond the Bucks, the Celtics, I believe, are at least the equal of Miami, and if they were to meet outside the bubble I don't think anyone could confidently say who would win. The Nets have a couple dudes named Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving. You don't have to stretch your imagination very far to see Miami, as currently constructed, as the fourth-best team in the East heading into next season, and that's not even accounting for the 76ers, who arguably have more top-end talent than the Heat.
All of this is to say, Miami, to me, will begin next season in roughly the same place it began this season: As a really tough team that nobody wants to play, that on any given night can beat any team in the league, but that could also lose in the second round and not one person would be all that surprised.
And that, potentially, is the one problem with this run they just made in the bubble. Did the Heat raise the expectations too high? I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Outsized expectations are the root of frustration, and there's going to be a whole lot of frustration in Miami if they can't repeat this playoff run next season, even if they arguably weren't as good this year as that run would suggest.
Think about the 2018 Portland Trail Blazers. They went to the conference finals, but if you really look at the circumstances of that run, it was not an accurate indicator of what Portland would do moving forward. The Blazers had a miraculous rally on the last night of the regular season to secure the No. 3 seed, which allowed them to avoid the Warriors in the second round. If they see Golden State one round sooner, and thus go home one round sooner, nobody talks about them much. Instead they draw the Nuggets, edge them out in seven, and suddenly they're a "contender" heading into 2019-20.
There were so many ways the Blazers could have been eliminated before the conference finals, but everything broke their way and, to their credit, they seized the opportunity. But did that make them truly one of the four best teams in the league? They weren't even a .500 team this season when the bubble began and they got smoked in the first round.
The Heat are better equipped for the postseason than that Blazers team, specifically because of Adebayo and their overall defensive versatility. But the moral of the story is the same: Are we sure the Heat are one of the two best teams in the NBA? Are we even sure they're one of the three best teams in the East?
We'll see what they do with their roster. I would guess they'll re-sign Dragic and Crowder on one-year deals, so as to not tie up their books with any money that could jeopardize their ability to chase Giannis, or another high-profile free agent, in the 2021 offseason. They'll use their mid-level exception on a contributing player. They may swing some kind of minor deal. If they land another star to play next to Butler, this is all moot. That may well happen two years from now.
But for right now, I would expect next year's Heat to look a heck of a lot like this year's Heat, and at the end of the day, I'm just not sure if this bubble run gave us a truly accurate picture of how good that team actually is.
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October 12, 2020 at 11:48AM
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Miami Heat had a magical bubble run, but be careful before you raise your expectations too high moving forward - CBS Sports
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