6 Thoughts
1) Oh my heavens! Fourth straight loss, all of them excruciating in one fashion or another. Miami falls two games behind the Bulls in the standings - and the schedule is staying tough. For awhile. I'm a few whiskey sours into my "late afternoon" already - the new drink du jour in Casa Dos. Let's Go and Let's Get it!
2) Miami took a two point lead with 20 seconds to go on successive Mario Chalmers hoops (!), including a triple with the shot clock winding down. On the ensuing Bulls possession, Luol Deng drove the lane against pressure, took a bump, and missed a shot - awarded two free throws. Fine. He made the first and missed the second. On the ensuing scrum for the loose ball, Erick Dampier extricated himself from a Joakim Noah death grip to come up with the ball. The whistle blew, and the Heat bench celebrated, thinking Noah had been called for a foul, and Miami was going to retain possession. Yet somehow official Tony Brothers - who struggled all game - called a foul away from the ball on Mike Miller, who bumped Deng as both reached for the ball. By the way, Deng shouldn't have even been in the lane - he left early. Brothers gave two more free throws to Deng, who made them both. Heat down one, 15 seconds to go...
3) ...and predictably, LeBron went strong to the rim, got his right arm pulled off the ball by Joakim Noah in an obvious foul, and missed a runner with his left hand. Obviously, he got free throws, right? I mean Deng just got four at the other end. Ummm, no, no free throws - ballgame over. That's a tough way to lose. The Heat are inventing new, brutal ways to lose games now - four free throws to the same guy in the span of .8 of a second on one end, and then a more egregious foul not called on the other end - it's frustrating. They don't "deserve" to win, they aren't "due" to win, it's nothing like that. It is this: if you play enough close games, and all these losses are close losses to good teams, you will eventually win games. There is no correlation to being a good team and winning or losing close games - study after study after study shows this. Bad teams win close games at about the same rate good teams do - it is the blowouts that separate them, record-wise. And from one year to the next, teams do not sustain success or failure in close games. They just don't - it's random. Does it feel random right now, the way Miami keeps losing these games? No, it does not. But it is. Which, actually, only makes it more frustrating!!!
4) Someone, for sure, is going to point out that just last blog I pointed out that LeBron is expected to play through contact that other players are awarded free throws for, and that tonight's game was decided when Deng shot four free throws to LeBron's none, on exactly the type of play we were talking about...If Noah grabs almost any other wing in the league on that last drive, the guy is going to be rerouted off his stride, and the ref would have been forced to call a foul. Since LeBron is so strong, he is supposed to play through it. Fine. Blame me all you want - two people have already pointed out this whole stretch of tough losses started when the blog came back. Just remember: I was the one who got LeBron here with the reverse jinx this summer. Performance in close games is absolutely random, but not this - this is very real. Talk about Wade, or Riley, or The Decision all you want - we all know LeBron would still be in Cleveland if I hadn't said he was not welcome here. Blame me for today if you want, I accept that. Live by the jinx; die by the jinx!
5) Can we take one positive out of this game? Chris Bosh played very well. He didn't just play well, but he played with some purpose, and even a dash of aggression. He was 9-14 for 23 points, and was solid defensively, with a lot of successful contests. Spo put him in the post early, which people have been crying for now for weeks - just to give the defense something else to look at. Against Boozer, in particular, it was a mismatch - Boozer isn't long enough to play him down there. I thought they got away from that in the second half - should have kept pounding it in there to him until Chicago showed they could stop it. If anything good came out of this game, maybe it was that. Guaranteed the jinx is coming: look for an absolute sleepwalk by Chris Tuesday against Portland! Although, now that I wrote that, how do you know I have not reverse double-jinxed him right back in to a good game - you don't!
6) From time to time, my travels will take me into Palm Beach. For those of you not from here, West Palm Beach is for the gully kids, like me, while Palm Beach is for the hoity-toity, high fallutin' set, like the Kennedys, people who own multi-national corporations, and Thor, who once went on a "camping trip" across America in his Lexus SUV. Still, as we all know, I am chameleon-like, a man who can survive in any social situation due to my rakish charm, lanky good looks, and insouciant attitude. Not too sure what "insouciant" means, by the way - I've finished two more whiskey sours while I've been writing...So when a recent trip took me to Palm Beach one morning, I was feeling good, and appropriately dressed in a nice suit, and I walked into the office where I had an appointment, and the very nice Palm Beach type lady greeted me, and asked if if I would like some coffee. Of course, I did not , since coffee is vile. But in this case, I didn't point that out, just politely declined. The lady kind of gave me a closer inspection, the proverbial "once over," if you will, and then goes, "Ahh - you really do look like more of a tea drinker." So I punched her in the fuckin' face. The end.
See you on Tuesday, when we will probably lose to Portland on either a technical foul due to an illegal substitution, or when Portland's backup point guard punts an 80 footer in to the basket at the buzzer. Will be a tough loss in spite of Chris Bosh's triple-reversed-up-re-jinx outstanding performance. See you then, you all hear?
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