Miami Heat Roundtable: Grading The Team’s Season

Miami Heat Roundtable: Grading The Team’s Season- Kenneth’s Take

The Miami Heat had a pretty good season. You can’t call it “great” because, well, they came up short of the title.

Kenneth’s Take (@K_Said_Que)

The Miami Heat are always a team that will be in the mix though. It’s just what they do.

When you build teams through hard work and effort, you always have a shot, as it’s harder for you to have an off night than most other teams. A lot of other teams pride themselves on skills or fabulous offensive players, which can come and go, be off on any given night, or be countered by great defense.

When your best ability is the counter to most other teams’ go-to weapon, that puts you squarely in a place to contend every night. That’s how the Miami Heat got as far as they did this season.

That, not only, stands for the regular season, with all of the injury, roster inconsistency, and absence that they endured, but the postseason as well.

The Miami Heat had some, flat-out, putrid offensive showings in their Eastern Conference Finals series against Boston, however, they were able to overcome that with hard work and effort.

Now, they were only able to force a Game 7 before losing on the last-second Jimmy Butler attempt.

However, being able to do that after some of their offensive showings, with the disparity in officiating (just go look at the free-throw numbers), and having to come back from double-digits down in Game 7 with only a few minutes left to even give Butler the chance to miss the shot, it’s a testament to their composure as a team and franchise.

It’s also really impressive. It would have been even more impressive to see them win the whole thing, but it was not to me.

This season wasn’t all bad though. It saw the emergence of Tyler Herro as one of the potential future faces of this franchise.

It saw Gabe Vincent become the point guard that we all knew he could be if he worked hard. It saw Max Strus step into his new role and succeed, for the most part, and much more.

Now, it also saw guys like Duncan Robinson take a step back after receiving big money this past offseason, but you can’t win them all either.

With the way the year happened, every single thing in between, the top-seed acquisition, the playoff run, Jimmy’s heroics all throughout, and them getting right up to the cusp of an NBA Finals berth—you can only knock them so much.

Overall Grade: B+

Again, you always hope to win it all, but only one team can do that in any given year. This year was not the Miami Heat’s, but they still had a heck of a year.

There are no moral victories either, so this wasn’t a win. But it wasn’t a total defeat either.