Rest assured, Miami fans: Heat aren’t dead

It's still early, and Miami's Big Three will soon figure out what works. (Getty Images)

If you’re a die-hard NBA fan, bookmark some of the stories and columns recapping Boston’s 112-107 victory in Miami on Thursday. I can’t remember a regular-season game met with more panic and glee at the expense of a team that, admittedly, brought that schaenfreude upon itself by holding a free-agent-signing celebration that resembled the coronation of a champion.

Seriously, though. Check out some of this stuff:

• Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports, who has been critical of LeBron James for months, slams James in his postgame column, complete with this dig on LeBron’s big-game résumé:

Most of all, James found himself in postseason shape, closing a loss to the Boston Celtics with a missed layup, two missed free throws and a corner three-pointer off the side of the backboard.

Wojnarowski also provides Glen Davis’ reaction to the game — a comment the Heat will likely remember for a while:

Big Baby Davis marched out of the showers and declared: “No one can spoil this night. Good for us to come in and spank that ass.”

Among other not-so-flattering tidbits from Wojnarowski:

Two days earlier, James had done nothing in overtime and ultimately decided the difference was a Hall of Fame coach, Jerry Sloan, who knew exactly what the Heat were going to do. James never takes responsibility, never says, “I’m the MVP and I need to do more.” He didn’t do it in Cleveland, and he’s never going to do it in Miami. Now, 44 minutes in a grudge game with the Celtics is too much. Always an out, always an excuse.

Strong words from a guy who knows the league as well as anyone.

• Michael Wallace, covering the team for ESPN.com’s Heat Index blog, writes what might be the most jarring sentence I’ve read about the NBA this year:

The Heat now face the very real prospect of falling to .500 on Saturday, because there doesn’t appear to be any reason why the Raptors won’t be capable of exposing Miami’s defense the way the Celtics did on Thursday and the Utah Jazz did two days earlier.

Really? The Raptors are going to shred the Heat’s defense just because Utah and Boston just did? I understand the concern, but we’re talking about the Raptors.

• And, of course, Paul Pierce added the coup de grace with a tweet so stinging I almost — almost — felt humiliated on James’ behalf just reading it:

“It’s been a pleasure to bring my talents to south beach now on to Memphis.”

I can appreciate the storyline of the veteran team with a nearly incomparable degree of familiarity refusing to cede its spot in the hierarchy to a group of young stars who acted as if they had won the title before they had played a game.

But the Heat are nine games into the season. Nine games into an experiment the likes of which we haven’t seen since … when, exactly? And if you can bring yourself to see through all the hate and grave-stomping, you’ll find a reality that is a bit more nuanced and less discouraging for the Heat and their fans (who, by the way, were pretty awful in the arena Thursday and have been all season).

The easy takeaway from the game is that Miami’s stars are not close to figuring out how to coexist, that the Heat became the Cavaliers down the stretch, with Dwyane Wade relegated to some embarrassing James Jones/Anthony Parker role of standing in the left corner and hoping LeBron might pass to him out of a LeBron/Udonis Haslem pick-and-roll. And that was true to some degree. There were possessions down the stretch where Wade could have been Jones or Parker, and it was incredible to watch perhaps the game’s second-best player marginalized to that extent.

But if you look carefully, there were glimpses of what this team can be on offense. At the nine-minute mark of the fourth quarter, the three stars worked beautifully together on a play that resulted in an open three-pointer for Jones. James, on the right wing, entered the ball to Chris Bosh at the right elbow. As Bosh held the ball, James cut down to the right corner where Wade was standing and set a screen on Wade’s man. Wade curled around the screen, which hit flush, took a hand-off from Bosh and drove into the lane. Boston collapsed, and Wade kicked to Jones in the opposite corner for an easy three.

All three stars, working together. It was there. You just had to look for it. Miami has to hope you won’t have to look so hard in April and May.

There were also several James/Bosh pick-and-rolls in crunch time, including one with about two minutes left that resulted in a switch, putting Kevin Garnett on LeBron. Five years ago, this would have been fun. In 2010, LeBron blew by Garnett for an easy layup.

Of course, James didn’t even look at Bosh on that play, even though Ray Allen had switched onto Bosh. And Bosh continues to alternate between effective third banana and virtually invisible third option. His failure to challenge Rajon Rondo’s spectacular dunk was embarrassing. There were moments when he appeared to have a baseline path to the basket, only he pulled up instead for contested jumpers.

But consider this: Boston played as close to a perfect game on offense as this team can produce, and the game was still in the balance late. Boston shot 54.4 percent overall, hit 9-of-16 threes (thanks in part to some terrible defense from Miami and Wade, in particular) and turned the ball over just 12 times. Understand: Boston’s turning the ball over a dozen or fewer times is a rare thing. This is a turnover-prone team, and when the Celtics take care of the ball and shoot well — especially from deep — they are pretty much unbeatable. Only Miami had a chance to beat them Thursday, despite all the raggedness.

Some readers are going to paint this as a blind defense of Miami and accuse me of being some sort of Heat apologist. Nonsense. The Celtics are, right now, a better team than Miami, and the Heat are dealing with some serious problems. Bosh is playing soft, they’re undersized and they are having trouble defending physical big men inside. But this notion that the Heat are already dead, that they won’t be able to figure out this stuff, that James doesn’t have “it”? Come on. It’s Nov. 12. Remember how everyone buried the Celtics last season when they went 27-27 over the last 54 games? And remember how everyone felt so silly about it when they were six minutes away from winning a title?

The Heat aren’t dead. They’re struggling, and they are not the favorites. But they’re not dead, and they won’t forget the aftermath of Thursday’s game.