What being a ‘top-third’ team in the NBA says about the Miami Heat
On the back of a tough defeat on Monday night, the Miami Heat now have to move forward and continue to grind things out right before the NBA All-Star break.
And though you love the way that they played the Denver Nuggets on Monday night, there are no moral victories, especially in defeat, while they had a questionable last sequence on offense that may have cost them an opportunity to further challenge the outcome of the game.
Either way, all isn’t as bad as it may seem or as bad as some out there may have you think because if you take the time to take a birdseye look at it all, from the macro perspective, it’s really not that bad at all.
A notion very present throughout the entire season, looking at the Miami Heat, all their gripes, and the rest of the Eastern Conference, no team besides Boston has really separated themselves that much.
The Miami Heat have work to do in the remainder of their season to get where they want to go. But they may not be as far back in that journey as you think.
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You can point to recent surges by teams like the Milwaukee Bucks, but even they don’t have an insurmountable lead on the Miami Heat in the standings.
And when it comes to that top team in the league and conference, the Boston Celtics, nobody plays them tougher or more hotly contested than the Miami Heat. It’s, sort of, as if Jimmy Butler and this Heat squad are their kryptonite.
And when you look at it from a league-wide perspective, taking a tally of every team in the NBA and the records, the Miami Heat are currently a top-10 team. That’s right, you heard it correctly—a top-10 team and what does that say?
That says that they are right there in the mix, potentially a tweak or two away, be that internally with schematics or improvement via other mechanisms or externally via an addition, from being a team that is also just as capable as any other is of winning it all.
In a year that sees everybody losing to everybody and a lot of teams dealing with injury, you have to give the Miami Heat that same credence.
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And if you trust Jimmy Butler as you should, if you believe that what Bam Adebayo is showing is for real, and in the success that is Coach Spoelstra’s track record—then you should believe that when the money is on the line in the postseason, they’ll have just as good a shot as anyone does.