SPORTS HATE DISCLAIMER: The following is the result of an immense build up of “sports hate” leaving my body all at once. It will sound brutal, uncompromising, and possibly even a bit unfair. However, “sports hate” is unique from actual hate in that I have no problems whatsoever with any of the Heat players, coaches, or fans, as I have not met any of them personally. Sports allow us to blow our emotions out of proportion without coming after one another for real, and that’s what’s going on here. I’m sure Bam Adebayo is a very nice guy.
The war is over! The Miami Heat have surrendered! The Boston Celtics have won! They’ve done it!
(Spontaneous and unhinged celebrations break out across the globe, with a few causing minor destruction of property.)
The Celtics beat the Heat so thoroughly that they will henceforth be known as the “Miami Lukewarm,” since their performances in Games 3 through 5 can hardly be described as scalding. Then again, they did blow plenty of smoke in the process, conceivably trying desperately to heat up whatever stew they were cooking so it stopped tasting like sewage.
Was that harsh? That felt harsh, but I’m allowing a three-day grace period to celebrate in the downfall of the Lukewa… I mean the Heat at the hands of the onward-marching Celtics before anyone buzzkills the fun. We have all weekend to do the whole “job’s not finished” routine, also… I’m not on the team! It’s not important for me to keep a level head and stay focused on the task in front of me, I can simply irresponsibly celebrate like a 37-year-old mother of two at her younger sister’s baby shower. Too much rosé? Maybe, but who knows how many more opportunities we’ll get to do this.
Photo by Barry Chin/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
I will simply revel in the victory and claim the spoils of war: doing the Electric Slide on the grave site of the 2023-2024 Miami Heat, a team that reeked so strongly of not-caring that I became utterly incensed every time they succeeded. Cue the music.
“Wish it could have been four, but we’ll take five.”
That’s Jaylen Brown after Wednesday night’s win, once again showing that nobody understands the feelings of Celtics fans quite like him. In fact, I wish it could have been three. Two even. In fact, next time let’s just beat them by so much in Game 1 that the NBA is forced to add a playoff series mercy rule if a team wins any game by over 180 points!
(Takes a few deep breaths.)
I was beyond sick of these guys, and while I wish they’d just forfeited after the Play-In Tournament—citing moral objections to playing against someone as nice as Derrick White—the Celtics were always going to have to do this the hard way. After the Heat embarrassed them last season, demons had to be exorcised with extreme prejudice. If this was a drag race, it didn’t matter that the Heat were driving a 1997 Toyota Camry with three wheels and the Celtics were in a Ferrari. It had to be all gas, no brakes.
And it was… as soon as the Celtics lost Game 2. After winning on another witchcraft three-point shooting performance, the Celtics dropped a cinder block on the accelerator and started playing like they had a bone to pick with every grain of sand on South Beach. They relaxed a bit in the following two games, but still smoked the Miami Lukewarm each time—holding them to under 90 points in three consecutive wins and leading for all but 89 seconds.
So how did this happen? Why did Miami-Boston—a perennially exciting playoff matchup that has produced two seven-game conference finals and one six-gamer in the last five years—fizzle out with such a dud? Sure, Miami grabbed a game, but otherwise looked like cardboard cutouts of an NBA team suddenly became sentient and had to play basketball to make ends meet in this economy.
The reason lies in two words: “Heat Culture.”
Here’s the official mission statement, emblazoned in the paint of Miami’s In-Season Tournament custom court:
Hardest working. Best conditioned. Most professional. Unselfish. Toughest. Meanest. Nastiest team in the NBA.
Who on earth green-lit that? Somehow, among a collection of custom courts and jerseys that look like they were designed in Kid Pix by simply using the “fill space with solid color” tool, the Heat managed to have the corniest one of them all. It’s possibly the least “Heat Culture” thing imaginable to boast about your intrinsic qualities when the process and fundamentals is what’s supposed to matter.
Anyone who gives themselves superlatives is inherently a loser. Hardest working? Best conditioned? Most professional? Have you guys even seen Tyler Herro try to defend a screen and then chuck the ball at Payton Pritchard and get a technical foul?
Unselfish isn’t even a superlative; that’s just saying they’re unselfish. They aren’t the “most unselfish” which would have fit the format, thereby admitting that there are teams more unselfish than they are. Toughest? Likely story. Meanest and nastiest? Now we’re getting somewhere.
“It’s easy to say teams can out-tough us,” said Jayson Tatum after the win. “What’s the definition of tough? Having louder guys on your team? That s#!% don’t make you tough.”
I don’t wish to misconstrue any of the Celtics’ words to make them seem more angry at the Heat than they probably were. The first thing Tatum did when the buzzer sounded was give Bam Adebayo a bear hug with nothing but smiles between them. Those guys are real friends, and at the end of the day, it’s all love. I am the angry one, and don’t experience the fraternity these guys feel for each other.
“Heat Culture” is supposed to be the NBA’s version of “the Patriot Way” in the NFL, the mindset that organizational competency and relentless commitment to doing one’s job breeds success. The difference between the two is the Patriots were actually, you know, winning championships. The Heat have simply gotten close to winning championships, and then received endless credit for doing so since they were massive underdogs. “What a coaching job by Spoelstra!” “Jimmy Butler is so clutch!” “Look at these undrafted players go!”
But therein lies your problem, my beloved Miami Lukewarm. The Heat of the post-LeBron era have relied on over-performing and outdoing themselves, essentially relying on Butler to emerge from his regular season hibernation and become a topflight superstar in the playoffs.
But upsets in the first round of the NBA Playoffs are exceedingly rare. It’s extraordinarily improbable for an eight seed to knock off a one seed, happening only five times in NBA history. Yet the Heat could not put together a solid stretch of regular season basketball to get out of the Play-In for the second straight year, and so they wound up facing the one seed once again.
The Heat mantra of “we don’t care what seed we get” is one of the most cope-laden statements in human history, up there with Blackberry saying no one would ever want a touchscreen and European governments thinking World War I would be over by Christmas.
It’s so divorced from actual reality, so unacceptably arrogant, and so teeming with snobbish exceptionalism that I’m tempted to not engage with it further. Of course, no one in the Heat organization actually said that, but Butler’s load management tells you everything you need to know. But until Wednesday night, it was still an open question whether or not the Heat could just coast into the eight seed and still have a real shot at the series.
But their mantra had to be wrong, since the implications of that attitude being acceptable were simply too catastrophic. It would essentially mean that they are unkillable, and as long as they aren’t one of the five worst teams in the conference, they always have a chance to contend for a title. This time around, they had no chance, and you could see it on their faces.
The Heat didn’t give up in Game 5, but they just ran out of ideas. The game turned into Adebayo post-ups into either a hook or fade away jump shot with the occasional Herro missed three, which is a bit like bringing a slinky to a gun fight. In the second half, the Heat didn’t have any “our lives are on the line” energy, but rather the demeanor of a team that really didn’t think they could win.
That’s because they couldn’t! These teams were such a mismatch it would have been outrageous to think they would actually take the series. Yeah… that’s—that’s kind of it. If you can tell, I’m starting to run out of energy for victory-lapping. Let’s ask Spoelstra what he thinks while I get some electrolytes.
“They probably had something to motivate them even more against us,” said Spoelstra after being eliminated. “I will not watch one minute of their games, but they’ll probably do this to several teams from here on out.”
I appreciate the sentiment, but I don’t think the Celtics will do that to anyone else, since no team they face will inspire the same level of maniacal destruction they levied on Vice City in the past week. They may do versions of that, but it won’t be exactly that.
Honestly, I think we’re all just glad it’s over. No more watching Adebayo set illegal screens or body check Al Horford. No more worrying about Miami Induced Shell Shock (M.I.S.S.) and a year of holding the belt in this rivalry.
And lastly, after dumping 20 tons of gravel on the dearly departed Heat Culture, I want to thank them for their contributions to my life. Spurred by vitriol from seasons past, Celtics-Heat playoffs games have produced some of my favorite columns ever. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, they do pull some pretty serious emotions out of me. Maybe that’s something I should work on.
Good series, good work, everyone. Rest up Porzingis, and keep doing that superhero routine DWhite. Obviously, there’s much more work to do, but I grant all of us one victory-lap voucher for now. That was mine.
