The Miami Heat are absolutely one of the best teams in the NBA. Why aren’t they playing on Christmas day and how do they stack up to those that are?
The Miami Heat are the fourth-best team in the NBA at a minimum, and the very best team at home this season, carrying a home record of 13-1 across 14 games in South Beach this year. While they have unwrapped surprise around the league thus far throughout the season, that very notion begs of a certain question. Why aren’t the Miami Heat playing on Christmas Day?
Well, the scheduling and thus the Christmas Day Games are scheduled well in advance and before anybody has a read on the league, so there’s how it happened. Why does it happen this way though, and are they right to go about it that way? One former Miami Heat player, the greatest one of all time to be clear, thinks it should be changed.
Proposal: Christmas games should be earned. Let’s have an element of surprise in the schedule. The teams that are playing well are the ones that needs to be playing on Christmas Day. Reward the teams just like we reward players with an in season AllStar game.
— DWade (@DwyaneWade) December 24, 2019
He is not alone in his thinking and he also did quite the elegant job at breaking down how it should go. That is “the how” and he even went into a bit of “the why”, but allow us to further drive it home. Let’s compare the Miami Heat with every team that plays on Christmas Day.
We will first take a look at overall records. We will then look to see if there are any “head to head” matchups. Lastly, we will talk about what the eye test says, and without further ado, here goes nothing.