The Miami Heat are built on the back of the Miami Heat Culture. To some, this just may be a phrase, a cliché, or something they use to describe themselves when the Miami Heat feel they are playing well or with the brand of ball that they want to play.
However, it’s none of that, exclusively. While all of that has something to do with it all, it’s also the very thing that allows them to play that brand of ball in question.
It is the thing that they build the team on or at least, they try. Those are those things from the will, discipline, hard-working mentality, and consistency that the Miami Heat play with when they’re playing at their best, such as their latest win against the Atlanta Hawks on Saturday.
Now, it doesn’t hurt that they hit a few shots in that one as well, but you get the picture. And speaking of the Atlanta Hawks, one former Hawk and Heat guy that was recently traded away by Miami had quite a set of interesting quotes that helps tie all of this together.
The Miami Heat traded Dewayne Dedmon to the Spurs, where he was promptly waived. Now in Philly, he hasn’t forgotten how his tenure ended in Miami.
Here is what former Miami Heat center, Dewayne Dedmon, had to say about the ending of his Heat tenure to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
"Dealing with plantar fasciitis, Dedmon lost playing time. That took a toll on him.The frustration boiled over and he got into a heated verbal altercation with coach Erik Spoelstra and threw a massage gun onto the court from the sideline during the Heat’s Jan. 10 game against the Thunder. He was ejected, suspended one game by the Heat, benched, and then traded.“At the end of the day, it’s not about motivation,” Dedmon said. “I got mental clarity. For myself, that’s the biggest thing that I need moving forward in my life and my career. I need mental clarity and stability“For me to get traded from there was my mental clarity and my stability.”"
Landing with the Philadelphia 76ers after being waived by the San Antonio Spurs, the team the Heat traded Dedmon to, his comments are very interesting from this particular vantage. There is, of course, a certain level of salt there.
But to be fair and while he did see a few of his minutes slip away, the way he handled it was not the way to handle it if the incident in question above was him handling it. While some might point to the sideline kerfuffle of a few seasons ago in comparison, that was different.
That was a team-wide scenario because they weren’t performing, whereas this more recent one comes off as an individual concerned with his own individual.
While it isn’t much to bash a guy on the way out of the door, as he seems to do here of his former team, you have to ask yourself this about it all. How much of that quote is fact?
How much of it is fiction? And lastly but perhaps most importantly, how much of it is just a deflection by someone who couldn’t deal with adversity?