Begging to Differ

Why the Miami Heat's winning streak is not all it's cracked up to be

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I'm getting tired of this.

Once again, for reasons unknown, it falls to me to point out what should be obvious to everyone.

If you have the slightest interest in sports, and have not been living under a rock these past two months, you know that as of this writing, the Miami Heat have won 25 games in a row. And all the sports media types have been stumbling all over themselves to celebrate the team's apotheosis.

We haven't seen this much Kool-Aid imbibed since Georgetown, Guyana in '78.

Clearly, I'm not as impressed by this achievement as everyone else. The reasons for this should be obvious; unfortunately, we seem to have reached a point in human history where the obvious no longer catches the eye of anyone blessed with a media pulpit, so I will attempt to set the record straight and explain why this performance--while noteworthy and respectable--falls short of the Olympian heights to which the NBA's press flacks wish to raise it.

First, there is the matter of the Heat, who plays for the Heat, and how they got there. I discussed this issue nearly two years ago on this site (see Miami's Vice, from June 2011). All the points made in that essay remain very much in play to this day. It should be no wonder that the collusion worked by James, Wade, and Bosh--which (as I pointed out then) damaged the game's competitive balance--would lead to this kind of result down the road. How do you expect other teams to compete against the squad that has hoarded a plurality of the league's best players? It stands to simple reason that the hoarding team will be able to dominate its competition to an exaggerated degree. The only thing exceptional about winning 25 games in a row is the fact that the streaking team has refused to take a night off and mail one in for such a long stretch of the schedule.

And remember, James and Bosh came to the Heat from other Eastern Conference teams (Cleveland and Toronto, respectively). No surprise then that the moves that weakened those two franchises would pay dividends down the road for the stars' new team. And, indeed, four of the Heat's 25 consecutive wins came against the two teams abandoned by Miami's prized additions.

That, of course, reflects a larger reality within the Heat's winning streak: beating up on Eastern Conference teams. The Heat, in winning their 25 games, have done so against only eight Western Conference teams (one game apiece against each of those teams). And of those Western teams, only five would make the playoffs today (Minnesota, Portland, and Sacramento are on the outside looking in, and will almost certainly remain there). That leaves 17 wins collected against the teams of the notoriously weaker Eastern Conference. Only six of those games against Eastern teams featured squads in playoff position.

So when we break down those 25 wins, we find that only 11 of those victories came against good teams. And, as noted before, there's a dearth of solid competition in the league because...hello!...most of the best players play for the Heat.

One game that many thought might snap the streak, against the Celtics on March 18, proved to be challenging but ultimately victorious for Miami. Perhaps Boston could have put up a better fight if the injured Kevin Garnett had played in the game. Or maybe the Celtics could have prevailed if they had kept one of their recent star players, Ray Allen, on the team. Of course, Allen now plays for...wait for it...the Miami Heat.

Thus, it's no surprise that the Heat, having plucked several of the best players away from their competition, are now dominating that rest of the league.

As they say on late night TV ads, "But wait...there's more!"

One of the favorite lines of hype, employed by the media lickspittles when waxing poetic about Miami's streak, is how the Heat are achieving something "historic" in winning this many games in a row. In more than one sense, this is true--but not necessarily in the way these pundits mean.

That the Heat have achieved the second longest winning streak in NBA history is undeniable. If they match or beat the Lakers' record 33 game streak, that will be a laudable accomplishment. The streak's value will be debatable (see above), especially if the team does not win the championship in June. But the trouble with this winning run is that it serves as yet more evidence that the NBA has a problem with delivering a truly competitive sport.

The game's history shows that dominance by one team (or, at best, two teams) during a given period of NBA history is not an anomaly--it is very much the norm. In the very beginning (during the late 1940s and early 1950s), the Minneapolis Lakers repeatedly prevailed. Eventually, the Celtics took the mantle and ran with it (championships consecutively from 1959 to 1967, with three other wins bookending the run). After the interregnum of the 1970s (when the title changed hands frequently among several teams, probably because of the competing presence of the ABA), we had the NBA's alleged Golden Age in the 1980s, when every championship except two was won by either the Lakers or the Celtics (only Philadelphia in '83 and Detroit in '89 crashed the two-team party). During the '80s, only five teams even played in the Finals. The 1990s saw six championships for the Bulls--a streak broken only because of Michael Jordan's fanciful two-year excursion through baseball's minor leagues. Competition during recent years has been slightly more open, but the turn of the 21st century still saw the Lakers add five titles in eleven years (and they lost two other Finals in the same period).

Noticing a pattern here? The history of the NBA can be summed up simply: flat out dominance by (usually) one team. Again and again, one team in the league has stood head and shoulders above the rest, often for years at a time. That such supremacy has not resulted in lengthy winning streaks more often should probably be chalked up more to fluke than a level playing field. Past teams, just as dominant as the Heat in today's NBA, may have taken their foot off the gas to rest up for the playoffs, rather than go all out looking to etch their names into the record books. Or perhaps, back in the day when the competition was better, they never got rolling on a long streak to begin with.

However the details may have played out, history shows that the Heat's standing within the league is not something exceptional and rare, but is in fact par for the course.

Indeed, seeing Miami dominate the league to this extent, and recognizing the flaws in the rest of the league that have helped create this streak, actually works to downgrade the accomplishments of past teams. That championship run forged by the Celtics in the '60s has always had a mythic aura to it; we've come to view that achievement as something almost herculean in scope, as heroic as any deeds reported in the Illiad or the Odyssey. But when viewed with a more jaundiced eye, when analyzed via the intelligence that has been honed by studying the causes and effects of the Heat's run, the shining victories of the past start to dim. Such superiority is simply what always happens in the NBA.

All of this truth telling comes from fairly straightforward analysis that can be done even by amateur sportswriters such as myself. No particular secret wisdom is required to see what there is to see in Miami's streak, and thus to keep the hyperventilating to a minimum. Instead, we get hysterical hype, ad nauseum. This failing by the sports media echoes the blindness we saw a few years ago--those same shortcomings I called out in the post referenced above. Those failings may ultimately prove to be one of the truest legacies of LeBron James's career: his actions, his team's exploits, have provided a backdrop against which the shallowness, the amateurism, the outright incompetence of what is currently alleged to be sports journalism have been exposed.

Sports fans deserve true reporting and insightful analysis; instead, all they get are shameless shills and hagiography. The Heat may keep winning; but the sports fans will continue to lose when it comes to what they get from the people reporting on the games.