Heat's title aspirations must be forged in season's fires
Posted Oct 25 2010 2:08PM
This is what it's like when the circus comes to town.
LeBron James and the Heat show up, and a crowd of more than 15,000 -- almost double the normal attendance for a preseason game -- shows up at Philips Arena last Thursday. James is booed almost every time he touches the ball. Julius Erving is courtside. So is Braves rookie slugger Jason Heyward. Underneath a ballcap, incognito, is the likely National League Most Valuable Player, Joey Votto of the Cincinnati Reds. Playing without Dwyane Wade and Mike Miller, and just getting Carlos Arroyo and Mario Chalmers back, 
the Heat loses to the Hawksin the final seconds. As the last ticks come off the clock, Hawks fans go crazy.
the Heat loses to the Hawksin the final seconds. As the last ticks come off the clock, Hawks fans go crazy."The crowd jumped up like they just won Game 1 of the playoffs," Udonis Haslem says. "We're going to get that every game. We understand that."
This is what The Decision and the tweeting and the alliance of the Super Friends and veterans great and small taking 50 cents on the dollar -- Jerry Stackhouse being the latest -- produces.
They have officially been together about a month now, with the hype greater than when the Fab Five got together at Michigan in 1991 (a group that included Juwan Howard, now 37 and on Miami's bench), greater than when Shaq came to South Beach via trade to play in 2004. Their three PR men will be at every game, home and away, and LeBron's guys are around, though not as conspicuous as they were in Cleveland, and the Heat are, of course, maxed out on TNT, ESPN and ABC.
But Miami's dreams of winning big -- "a multiple number of championships," as Chris Bosh puts it -- have to be tempered a bit, at least at the beginning of the regular season. The Heat barnstormed at half-strength throughout the preseason, with Wade limited to three minutes of action because of his pulled hamstring in the exhibition opener and required presence at his child custody hearing in Chicago last week.
How well Chris Bosh handles single coverage on defense will shape Miami's offense.
Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images
James missed a few days of camp with a hamstring. Eddie House is just getting up to speed following offseason shoulder surgery. Arroyo missed two weeks with a groin; Chalmers has been battling an ankle injury. And adding injury to more injury, Miller fractured his thumb in practice on Wednesday, tore ligaments in the thumb and will be out until January following surgery on Friday.
No one cares.
No one outside of American Airlines Center is ever going to feel sorry for these guys.
"Our players are very mature," coach Erik Spoelstra said. "Most of these guys have been around a long time. We've talked about it for three weeks, how we want to tighten the circle. There are a lot of expectations on us. We want to embrace it."
Inside the bubble, where the hype is a muffled pounding on the walls, there is confidence, but also nervousness. No one within the team really expects Pat Riley to dial up his own number and replace Spoelstra if the Heat get off to a bad start -- Spoelstra is a Riles protege -- but no one expects Riles to sit idly by if the season slips away. What that would look like, no one knows. But Miami has all its chips in the middle of the table. Nothing other than another championship parade down Biscayne Boulevard will be acceptable.
Miami has to follow up the financial sacrifices that James and Bosh made to come south with additional sacrifice on the court. There will be nights when James or Wade, or both, are unstoppable, and have the offense come through them, and Miami will be nearly unbeatable. There will be nights when Bosh dominates the single coverage that will surely come his way, and makes the open shots that the offense will get him at the elbow and foul line, and Miami will again be hard to stop.
There will be nights, when Miller returns, that he -- or House, or Chalmers -- will make 7-of-9 open threes. There will be nights when James and Wade are active defensively and get the Heat going on the break, and if Spoelstra can get them to stop trailing back for the ball to lead the break and get out and run on the wings, Miami will have a transition game that might be the best since the Showtime Lakers.
But there will be nights when none of those things happen, and the Heat will have to grind.
"A lot of people's concerns is, 'is the ball big enough?,' " Bosh said. " 'Are there gonna be enough shots for everybody?' To be quite frank, I remember '07, and people were asking the same thing about the Celtics their first year (with Kevin Garnett, Ray Allen and Paul Pierce), and they came out and showed people how to really play team basketball, and how superstars can come together for the team.
"We're gonna have to do that same thing ... we're gonna have to set screens for each other, have each other's back on defense. It's so many other parts of the game where we have to play well and sacrifice for each other, other than offense."
Bosh is doing his part by overcoming his long-held aversion to playing some center for the size-challenged Heat, who will start Joel Anthony in the middle. Anthony will throw his body around willingly, but he's not the on-ball defender that Anderson Varejao was for the Cavs. And Miami doesn't have a 7-footer other than Zydrunas Ilgauskas on the roster.
It normally takes time -- months -- for a team to get its defensive scheme down pat. For example, Miami is struggling with how to defend without fouling. It took Cleveland a year, James said, to understand what Mike Brown wanted.
"When Mike came in (to Cleveland), we weren't as much of a veteran club as we are here," James said. "We have a veteran ballclub here. We have a lot of guys that know how to play the game and don't need much time to implement a system. Defensively is the easiest thing. It's the offense that kind of takes a bit longer, because you have to understand guys' tendencies, pros and cons and things like that. Defensively, we can figure it out on the fly."
Miller's injury is a big blow. Spoelstra was planning to use him in several spots, from two guard to power forward, depending on the matchup. The Heat already saw what the Wolves and Wizards did when they played with Miller every day -- he's a much better team defender and rebounder than people give him credit for being. With him out, it's going to take a long time, James believes, for the team to jell.
"I think probably next year," James said. "I'm not saying next season ... next calendar year, January, taking that flow from the middle of January going into All-Star week. I think that's realistic. I think we have enough talent that we can win ballgames. But as far as the jelling, the chemistry, it's going to take a while. Because this is a team game. There's a lot of teams that are ahead of us. But to get where we want to be, I think it'll take a little while."
James has had the misfortune (a habit?) of drawing attention to himself just when the last controversy is dying down. So it was last week, when he released three nasty messages he'd received via Twitter. One used a racial slur to describe James; another used another vulgarity. James referred to the whole thing on his Twitter account as "Haters Day" and "thanked" the critics.
Coach Erik Spoelstra shouldn't be worried about job security this season.
Issac Baldizon/NBAE via Getty Images
I wondered, I asked James, if he thought the public had any better idea of what he's gone through -- and what I meant by that but didn't articulate better is the intensity of the blowback he's received since announcing his decision -- after he released the negative tweets.
No, James said.
Then why release them?
"No one can understand what you go through as an individual," James said. "I can't understand what you go through, either, as much as we see each other every day. No one can really understand what you go through ... I'm not out here pleading for everything. But you want people to know that you recognize it, and at the same time you try to build upon it and get better."
I asked Bosh if he'd noticed James had been affected by the negative publicity of the summer.
"I don't know if it will affect him, but it's definitely a part, it plays a part in someone's life, when there's a lot of negative publicity," Bosh said. "The best thing to do is just ignore it and play basketball. That's what we all do best. When you engage in it a little bit too much it can become too much for you ... at the end of the day, you can't really do anything about people talking.
"People are gonna talk. People are gonna watch TV, and unfortunately, in order to get better ratings, people have to be negative."
Whether that attention came despite what the Super Friends did this summer or because of it is now irrelevant. The Heat are no longer a theory, just a basketball team trying to figure things out.
