The Miami Heat had a magical 2023 NBA playoff, going all the way from the play-in tournament finale to the NBA Finals. They couldn’t win the championship but still made a big impression on their fans and the rest of the league.
Now that everything is said and done, executives reportedly believe this run was just a fluke. According to Zach Lowe of ESPN, executives believe that things could have been very different for the Heat if Giannis Antetokounmpo never got hurt in the First Round of the playoffs.
“As rival teams watched the Miami Heat climb out of the play-in muck and into the NBA Finals, many discussed the same question internally: What — if anything — can we learn from this?” wrote Lowe.
“For some executives, the answer was very little. The Heat’s run, the thinking went, was some combination of a fluke and a reversion to normal for a team that had gone cold from 3-point range all season. Would they have survived even one round had Giannis Antetokounmpo not injured his back in the first game of Miami’s first-round series against the Milwaukee Bucks?”
A lot has been said about this Finals run, but there’s nothing anybody can do to change what the Heat accomplished during their 2023 playoff campaign. They went all the way to the Finals and were able to beat the Denver Nuggets at home, but they couldn’t do much more to beat the eventual champions.
Jimmy Butler was on a tear during the first part of the playoffs, but things changed when the Boston Celtics started their comeback in the Eastern Conference Finals. He couldn’t deliver against the Nuggets, either, with the Heat losing the Finals on five games.
Miami Is Ready To Bounce Back Next Season
Now, they’re ready to add more firepower to the team, with Damian Lillard on the team’s radar. Jimmy Butler recently shared an Instagram story listening to one of Lillard’s songs, stirring the pot around the league.
Lillard also turned a lot of heads to him when he hopped on Instagram Live while listing to ‘Welcome To Miami.’ Things are getting interesting between the team and the player, and we have to wait to see what happens between them.
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