Heat might have cracked the code

Miami’s ‘perfect marriage’ with Butler leads to NBA Finals showdown with Nuggets

It’s one of the mysteries of team building.

In this big-money, big-data era of pro sports, clubs can blanket the earth with scouts to identify the best available talent. They can use video and analytics and a laundry list of expensive resources to confirm their suspicions.

But if this spring has reminded us of anything, it’s that the most talented team on paper doesn’t always win. Just ask the Maple Leafs. Just ask the Boston Celtics. Don’t even bother asking the Raptors, whose culture is so broken that team president Masai Ujiri cited “complacency” and “selfishness” as a couple of the defining characteristics of this year’s hard-to-watch squad.

The Leafs, of course, can always find a way to blame someone else for their underachievement. Certainly there are those close to the team’s Core Four who’ve been suggesting Toronto’s second-round exit at the hands of the Panthers was simply a product of the magnificence of Florida goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky, full stop. Nothing else to see here. Sometimes the best goalie wins.

And the Celtics, too, can tell themselves that Monday’s Game 7 noshow against the Miami Heat was just one of those lamentable nights. Boston’s best player, Jayson Tatum, turned his ankle in the opening throes and it only got worse from there. Just not their night.

But the folks who run the Leafs and Celtics would be kidding themselves if they didn’t at least consider the possibility that there were other forces at work in their ouster — specifically the compelling underdog oomph of the Panthers, who’ll begin the Stanley Cup final against the Vegas Golden Knights on Saturday, and the unrelenting energy of their fellow No. 8 seed from South Florida, the Heat, who’ll tip off in the NBA Finals in Denver beginning Thursday night.

Maybe some people around the Leafs have already admitted as much. Heck, before Kyle Dubas was fired earlier this month, the longtime general manager spent a few moments pointing to the potential merits of making a franchisechanging trade — citing the monster deal that plopped Matthew Tkachuk into the heart of the Panthers’ lineup.

If Tkachuk embodies a certain kind of seize-the-moment spirit that’s not always easy to quantify but often seems lacking on the Leafs — well, maybe it’s not a coincidence that the Heat seemed possessed of a similar urgency in droves.

Call it team toughness, or tenacity, or fearlessness. Call it an anti-fragile ability to rise to the season’s biggest moments and not be broken by its lowest ones. Call it Heat Culture, as it’s been coined on South Beach, where 78-year-old team president Pat Riley has long insisted the Heat be “the hardest working, best conditioned, most professional, unselfish, toughest, nastiest team in the league.”

Whatever it is, Miami is built on it. Top player Jimmy Butler, deemed a team-wrecking problem in previous environs, defines himself by it and holds teammates to it. Miami coach Erik Spoelstra calls it “a perfect marriage.”

“Jimmy’s never had to apologize. I don’t want him to apologize for who he is and how he approaches competition. It’s intense. It’s not for everybody, and we’re not for everybody,” Spoelstra said. “We never judge him on that. He never judges us on how crazy we get.”

That’s admirable when you consider the actual merits of Miami’s self-admitted craziness aren’t always readily quantifiable. The Heat, who needed to beat Chicago in a must-win play-in game to even get into the eight-team Eastern bracket, came into the post-season as 60-1 long shots to win the East. That, of course, speaks to the limits of handicapping a team’s playoff prospects by referencing its regular-season results. The Heat were, by every measure, ho-hum over the 82-game grind. They won a mere 44 games.

But since acquiring Butler in a sign-and-trade with the Sixers in 2019, Miami has been a consistently difficult playoff out. This will be the Heat’s second trip to the NBA Finals in those four seasons. They’ve been to the Eastern final in three of the past four.

All this despite the fact Miami’s lineup is, to many eyes, ridiculously small. Their depth has been hindered by injuries to Victor Oladipo and Tyler Herro, the latter of whom is expected to be healthy enough to return at some point in the championship series. Which is to say, the scouts would tell you the Heat aren’t the most talented team. Any number of stats can confirm they’re hardly the most efficient one. And yet they’re the second No. 8 seed to advance to an NBA Finals. If they can figure out a way to slow down Denver’s Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray, perhaps they can become the first to win.

Which brings us back to the mystery of team building. The Heat, yet again, have put forth a squad of relentless gamers. If Butler’s bigmoment credentials have been long established — and if Kyle Lowry is a championship-proven hand off the bench at age 37 — this year’s revelation is Caleb Martin, an undrafted fourth-year pro who torched the Celtics by shooting 49 per cent from three-point range while averaging 19 points a game in the Eastern final. While Butler was named the series MVP, Martin’s contribution was the most unexpectedly vital.

“It’s (Martin’s) last breath on every possession,” Spoelstra told reporters after Monday’s game. “I love the guy for that.”

Spoelstra said Martin’s competitive nature inhabits his “soul.”

“You get to the higher stakes, the more you go along, the more competitors are going to reveal themselves,” the coach said. “Game 7s, you get to the conference finals, it’s not for everybody. Otherwise more players, more teams would do it. You have to be wired a little bit differently.”

If big-game performers are wired differently, the trick is in reverse engineering the schematics to figure out which players to trust when it matters, ideally before it matters. The Heat have established their long list of franchise non-negotiables. But whether or not they knew Martin would be one of the linchpins to their latest playoff run — well, a year ago Martin didn’t play so much as a minute in a Game 7 loss to the Celtics in the Eastern final.

Therein lies the mystery of building a would-be champion. Some teams seem to unravel it better than others.

“We have a bunch of guys that just love competition,” Spoelstra said. “Just drop us off anywhere and compete for it. Put ourselves out there, open to all the criticism and everything. But hey, it’s got to happen between these four lines. We don’t care what the rest of the world is saying, who’s criticizing who. You’ve got to line up between these four lines and let’s figure this thing out.”