The Miami Heat Use Canned Noise?
2010; a year when the tallest man-made structure was opened, earthquakes caused chaos in Haiti and Chile, WikiLeaks was well…leaked, and LeBron James announced his intentions of joining the Miami Heat alongside Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. At that moment, the Heat notoriously became the most hated team in the league, and despite James’ departure this offseason, nothing seems to have changed. While Miami was once despised for housing too many superstars in once place, it is now taunted for remaining confident with only two, moving forward.
Naturally, due to such a reputation, a variety of nicknames and gossip continuously float about. And while I have actually grown quite fond of the term “Miami Mafia,” dealing with press who would rather focus on the rumor-mill rather than the game at hand, is probably exhausting.
Last Wednesday, the Heat opened their 2014-2015 season at home against the Washington Wizards. In attendance at the AmericanAirlines Arena was a sell-out crowd of 19,744, I assume most of which where there to cheer the home team on; although many Miami supporters may have jumped ship since James took off, Heat Nation has certainly not disappeared. However, according to one Washington broadcaster, Steve Buckhantz, this is hard to believe.
During his broadcast, as the crowd was going wild, he stated, “they’ve gone to the canned crowd noise here in Miami, which is, I guess, something you have to do when LeBron James leaves.”
For reasons that should be obvious, Heat Vice President Michael McCullough was less than thrilled by Mr. Buckhantz’s comments and took to the Sun Sentinel to set things straight:
"“I don’t know who Steve Buckhantz is. I don’t give a crap who Steve Buckhantz is. I am happy to have him sit in our sound booth and see we don’t pump in extra crowd noise. We don’t have to. We never have, never will, and don’t need to pump in crowd noise. We don’t do that here. We have fights with the NBA all the time because of our sound level. Their meter picks up our crowd noise as being too loud. We’ve had numerous discussions with the NBA about it.”"
At this point, I have accepted that a great deal of NBA fans may never speak kindly of Miami. Unless someone can top James’ hour-long decision special, that might forever leave a sour taste in the mouths of many. But have we not gotten to the point where the jokes are old? Where coming up with mindless excuses to humiliate the Heat is simply, tiring?
I guess not. After all, if broadcasters feel comfortable throwing around insults, why should the rest of the population stop? Clearly creating tabloid-ready content just because is more important than focusing on our love for the game!
Canned noise, really? What will they think of next?