PHILADELPHIA — Only one guy in the Miami Heat locker room has been there, done this.
And no, we are not including LeBron James and his 36-game winning streak at St. Vincent-St. Mary’s High School in Akron.
The only guy who has been through a stretch like this is Shane Battier, who was a member of the 2007-08 Houston Rockets team that strung together 22 consecutive victories — the second longest in NBA history.
That streak, to use Battier’s words, came out of left field.
This streak, to use a few words of our own, is a 100 mph fastball coming right down the pike. You can swing at it, but making contact is a matter of luck more than skill. With this Heat team, we are witnessing collective greatness manifest itself at a whole different level, and it is wondrous to behold.
If you aren’t watching these guys every night they play, you are cheating yourself. Enjoy March Madness when it arrives, but keep the remote control handy. If you want to watch something truly special unfolding, watch the Miami Heat.
We expect our defending champions to play to a higher standard. We expect them to extend their greatness, to take it to extraordinary heights, to get people buzzing by virtue of the sheer magnitude of what they are in the process of accomplishing. That’s why folks were down on the Heat when they were looking all too pedestrian in December and January.
But those days are long gone, and this is not a Heat team that is peaking at the wrong time. This is simply a Heat team that can peak to the point of reaching a pinnacle — and that pinnacle, an NBA record 34 consecutive wins (one more than the 1971-72 Los Angeles Lakers strung together), is realistically within their reach.
With two more wins, the Heat will match the streak set a half-dozen years ago by the Rockets. With 13 more wins — yes, that is getting ahead of ourselves, but bear with us — this Miami Heat team can accomplish something that hasn’t happened for more than four decades. It’ll take another month for them to get there, but doubt them at your own risk with the way they are playing. Even when they falter as they did Wednesday night in a four-point win over the Sixers, or play down to the level of their opponent and squeak one out the way they did last week against Orlando, they rise to the occasion at the end.
And when winning the close ones, the easy ones and the difficult ones becomes second nature, the way it is happening now for the Miami Heat, look out. If these guys get this streak to 34 games, we might as well cancel the Eastern Conference finals and give the Heat a bye into the finals. They’ll have scared the wits out of everyone in the East, and the playoffs will be a series of walkovers.
The fun part about this is … the fun actually starts now.
Battier was recalling how the 2006 Rockets put together their 22-game streak seemingly out of nowhere, capitalizing on an easy stretch of schedule and reaching their apex with a team that was a nice team, but nowhere near the level of team he is playing for now.
“That was so different because that streak was so organic, it came out of left field and no one could explain it, because it was a bunch of journeymen and role players doing it. The thing I remember about that streak is the Lakers game that got us to 22, and Kobe tried to singlehandedly beat us on national TV, and it took everything out of us. Boston came in next and kicked our butt, we lost by 20, and we kept losing after that because we were spent emotionally.”
Milwaukee is the team standing in the way of the streak growing to 21, and next up after that is a back-to-back at Toronto and Boston before this five-game road trip closes against a Cleveland Cavaliers team missing its two best players. The Heat have had their problems in Boston during recent regular seasons, so that one is certainly no gimme — especially coming on the second night of a back-to-back.
Boston, despite being a team that just lost by 26 to Charlotte, is a team that rises to the level of its opponent. No disrespect to the Bucks, who beat the Heat by 19 the last time Miami visited Milwaukee, but they are not in the same class as the Heat at this juncture, a team that looked in the mirror six weeks ago and said it was tired of being a .500 road team that gave maximum effort for only 34-36 minutes on the road, at most.
Since then, coach Erik Spoelstra explained to me Wednesday night, the laser-like focus has been present for 42 to 44 minutes of each and every road game — and those eight extra minutes of focus and intensity have kept this streak alive.
You could say that 20-game winning streaks mean nothing — and you’d have a point. The Spurs had two of ’em last season, the latter of which ended when they lost four in a row to the Thunder in the Western Conference finals. Did that streak give them a false sense of bravado? Perhaps.
Did the Rockets’ 22-game streak lead them to the promised land in ’08? No.
Does this 20-game streak guarantee anything except the fact that Miami will finish No. 1 in the East? No.
But what it is doing is sending a message to the rest of the league that this Heat team might be too physically and mentally tough to be handled by anyone — yes, even you Popovich, as spring rolls around, the humidity returns to Miami and the heat, as in warmth, returns to the rest of the Lower 48.