After a sluggish start to the season, there were legitimate concerns that the championship window had closed for the Miami Heat. With an aging Jimmy Butler, inefficient Kyle Lowry, and a questionable pool of depth, some believed the Heat were better off rebuilding and re-tooling around Bam Adebayo than they were trying to compete with this current cast of players.
True or not, there is a unique opportunity in the NBA this year that matches a growing trend of parity over the past few seasons.
As Heat coach Erik Spoelstra explained in a chat with Ira Winderman of the Sun Sentinel, the log jam at the middle is more crowded than ever and it all has to do with the addition of the play-in tournament.
“We had a devastating loss the other night at Charlotte, and then to keep it in perspective, you wake up the next morning and even with only being plus-five, we had the ninth best record in the league,” Spoelstra said. “That’s a head-scratcher to me. Usually you have the top teams, maybe a handful of middle teams and the rest were tanking. That’s not the case any more. I think that’s good.”
The play-in may have made the path more difficult for some teams, but for others, it opens up an opportunity they might not have otherwise had. In the West alone, only a few games separate the 5th seed from the 12th seed.
Is Tanking A Dying Trend In The NBA?
The worst teams in the league will always be gunning for the top lottery pick, but the play-in tournament has certainly succeeded in enticing more teams to win now and put themselves in a position to make some kind of run.
“I think it’s been happening now for three years,” he said, before giving his team Wednesday off. “Two years since the play-in was put in, right? I think that’s the biggest driver in this. You just have far less teams tanking. Am I allowed to say that word? Come on, this happens in this league. But now you have a bunch of teams that probably weren’t necessarily thinking in either conference that they would have a chance of being in the play-in. At this point, you might as well go for it. The experience you get is just driving the competition level league wide, and this is the way it should be.”
In the NBA, there really aren’t any easy games anymore. Any team can win on any given night and it has made things extremely interesting across the league.
This season, nobody has a clue how things will play out and it’s a welcome change from the predictable seasons we’ve had in the past.
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