Even after a five-game first-round playoff series win over New York, questions remain as to whether this Heat team is title material.
MIAMI – In the end, the feckless New York Knicks were powerless against the Miami Heat. And no one is surprised. This first-round playoff series was a mismatch from the start and it didn’t reveal anything about either team.
We still don’t know if the Heat are good enough to win the title. We still don’t know if the Knicks are on their way to becoming a decent team. This series was mildly entertaining, but no questions were answered about New York or Miami.
The Knicks showed fight. Give them credit. They didn’t give up in Wednesday’s 106-94 Game 5 series-ending loss to the Heat, and they stole a Game 4 victory when they should have been swept. Relatively speaking, they did OK. They earned a measure of respect.
“Even though it was a five-game series,” guard Dwyane Wade said, “It was a very tough series.”
Still, for a series that seemed to have so much intrigue and drama, it fizzled into LeBron vs. Carmelo. And that didn’t even materialize into an interesting matchup until Games 4 and 5. But for those two games it was something to behold.
Anthony scored 76 points in the last two games. James scored 56. Both players did amazing things.
In Game 5, LeBron ended with 29 points, eight rebounds, seven assists, two steals and a block. Melo, after scoring 41 points in Game 4, ended with 35 spectacular points in Game 5, many coming with defenders all over him.
“I don’t know how you stop that guy,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said.
Here’s the solution: you put him on the Knicks.
In the final analysis New York is a bad team, and bad teams go down the way the Knicks went down – in five games. The Carmelo Anthony-Amare Stoudemire Knicks are 1-8 in their two-year playoff run. That’s awful.
No Knicks players showed up for Game 5 other than Anthony (29 points). Well, that’s not true. Mike Bibby (12 points) was ready to ball. But Stoudemire (14 points, four rebounds, five turnovers) was weak. Chandler (seven points, 11 rebounds, four blocks) was so-so, at best. And J.R. Smith (12 points on 3-for-15 shooting) and Steve Novak (0-for-0 shooting in 12 minutes) will be appearing on milk cartons any day now. They were missing the entire series.
On the other end of the eastern seaboard there was a huge sigh of relief. Game 5 is over. This series is over. There’s no threat of losing to the hated Knicks.
That’s partly because the Heat’s non-Big Three players did some good things in this series. None was consistently good, but among guys such as guard Mario Chalmers, forwards Udonis Haslem, Mike Miller and Shane Battier, and center Joel Anthony, they did enough to quiet the doubters.
And, yeah, the doubters were starting to grow in numbers. No one doubted whether the Heat would defeat the Knicks, but whether the Heat could do so while maintaining its dignity, which entailed winning this series in four or five games.
As much as Heat fans don’t want to admit it, as the hours went on they were growing more irritated and agitated with that Game 4 loss. Hey, these are the hated Knicks. History has showed anything is possible. You don’t want to extend the series against these guys.
Much to the relief of Heat fans, the ghosts of crushing playoff losses to the Knicks in 1998, 1999 and 2000 remain bad memories instead of born-again nightmares. Wade (19 points, four rebounds, three assists, two steals, two blocks), James and Chris Bosh (19 points, seven rebounds) saw to that. Miami’s Big Three took care of business.
That was the challenge for the Heat, taking care of business. It was a theme of sorts after watching teams such as Boston, Philadelphia and the Los Angeles Lakers lose the chance to close out their series while holding a 3-1 lead.
“Watching three teams not able to close it out (Tuesday),” Wade said, “coach wanted us to prove that we were ready to close it out here at home.”
So that was basically the pre-game speech.
“One of the things we told them before the game was, ‘Prove it,’ ” Spoelstra said. “Prove this means more to you than them.”
The Heat proved that, but that’s about all they proved during this first-round series.
And so after one round of playoff basketball we still don’t know whether this Heat team is cut from championship timber. Maybe we’ll find out more in this second-round matchup against Indiana.
Chris Perkins is a regular contributor to SheridanHoops.com, covering the NBA and the Miami Heat. His columns regularly appear every Tuesday. Follow him on Twitter.
“No one doubted whether the Heat would defeat the Knicks, but whether the Heat could do so while maintaining its dignity, which entailed winning this series in four or five games.”
Two of your colleagues had knicks in 7.
I have to disagree. The Knicks are not a “bad team”, they were a limited team due to all the injuries. It is like saying the Bulls are a bad team because they are down against the Sixers, without pointing out why they are down(key injuries). Also, little did we know, Tyson Chandler has been playing with a possibly fractured wrist through the whole series.
Oh please, the Heat secondary players were as poor as the Knicks secondary players throughout the series. That’s going to have to improve tremendously if the Heat are going to beat SA or OKC.
Hey an article admitting the Knicks were terrible. Better late than never.