The Miami Heat are coming off of a pretty good win on Saturday evening against one of the other top teams in the league. To get it out the way, no win is a bad win.
They came out on the other side of it all with the W, so that’s that. However, you can take two separate and coexisting things from the way it happened.
It was known, but the Miami Heat are a pretty darn good ball club. They are good enough to go up 19 on the Utah Jazz, the best team in the other conference, with only five minutes left in the game.
In most situations, the white flag is waived and that game is over. However, on the other side, the Miami Heat shouldn’t have to fight and claw to the very end to secure a game that they were up 20 in with just five minutes left.
Again, there are key takeaways on both sides there. As far as the negative, you see something manifest itself from past seasons and also something that may have happened in the prior game to Saturday’s win… the Celtics defeat.
The Miami Heat are a really good team, among the league’s best. However, they’ll need to be sure to not get to caught up in themselves navigating the year.
The Miami Heat began to smell themselves. If you look at the Celtics and heading into that contest, they were dealing with a rather combustible internal scenario.
Not that the Heat read the press or anything like that, but just being fans, players, and people, they certainly follow the news. Knowing how bad, performance and team-chemistry wise, this Celtics team had been, they didn’t attack it with the neccessary mentality to come away with the win.
That’s the same thing or phenomenon at play with the Jazz that allowed them to close such a sizeable gap. Now, back to the positive.
The Miami Heat’s grit, leadership, talent, and clutch shot-making (Hey Jimmy Butler) were able to propel them to the victory. You have confidence and you feel good that they can come out on the other side of a situaiton like that successful, because winning a title will certainly take some of that.
However, those same features are what also gives you confidence that they won’t find themselves in too many scenarios like that moving forward, especially with these past two wakeup calls.
The Miami Heat will be fine and that’s mostly because they’re a really good, deep, and talented team. Secondly though, hopefully these past few games have taught them that they still have to do the work and to stop smelling themselves.
Because nobody is going to roll over because they are them and in fact, that means the opposite. They’ll always get the other team’s best shot and that’s even on a night where your fourth option, the QB1 in Kyle Lowry, can mess around and get a triple-double.