The 2023 Miami Heat might be the team with the most heart and grit in all of the NBA. There’s just something so appealing about a team who is on the court to strictly play basketball and nothing else. No media controversies, no trade requests, no arrogant superstars, just pure unadulterated basketball.
It is an environment that the Miami front office and truthfully the players they’ve accumulated have built starting with the acquirement of Jimmy Butler back in 2019.
The players that make up Miami’s core, i.e. Butler, Bam Adebayo, Kyle Lowry are all in essence ‘low-maintenance’ players, that output at the highest level. Simply put players like Adebayo and Butler bring their A-game to the court and prefer to stay in the lowlight off the court.
The Heat play a brand of basketball that has been long forgotten, pure hustle basketball with good team coordination and a fan-filling amount of highlight plays. Players like Butler are in rare stock nowadays within the league and the Heat sure have built up a nice core for future contention.
Bam Adebayo reveals the Heat’s Mentality in an interview
The secret to the Miami Heat’s calm mentality has always been an elusive topic. Is it the effect of having a leader like Jimmy Butler in the locker room? Or a calm and collected coach in Erik Spoelstra, who has years of experience and knows what to do in every situation. In an interview with Malika Andrews, the star center of the Heat, Bam Adebayo opened up about what the team has been trying to structure their play like and even offered his thoughts on how he believes the game of basketball should be played.
“Everybody thinks basketball always supposed to be pretty… That’s not how we do it. It’s rugged, it’s in the mud, it’s nasty basketball… It’s our way and we don’t care what you think about it, we don’t care how it looks, it gets wins.”
🗣️ Bam Adebayopic.twitter.com/Hu0SRXdeW2
— ClutchPoints (@ClutchPointsApp) June 6, 2023
Andrews asked how Bam felt about the criticism the Heat faced in recent weeks. Adebayo replies saying, “Because everybody thinks basketball is supposed to be pretty… it’s supposed to be fluid this that third it’s supposed to look a certain way because other people do it, that’s not how we do it, you know it’s rugged, it’s in the mud, it’s nasty basketball and we don’t care, the way we play how we go about it you know the way coach wants us to play.
“It’s our way of basketball you know you can’t change everybody’s way of basketball, it’s our way and we don’t care what you think about it, we don’t care how it looks and it gets wins,” he added.
Miami in general has faced a lot of media scrutiny and understatement due to them being the eighth seed. They were barely given a chance to get out of the first round against the Milwaukee Bucks and it continued.
Even up 3 games to none against the Celtics, the Heat were only given an 80% chance to reach the NBA Finals. All those statistics have led to the Heat players shutting out the outside noise and continuing to play the game, the way they see fit and that is a winning brand of basketball as we can see.