MIAMI As his superstars stayed back in the losing locker room, Erik Spoelstra made an unprompted, revealing plea on the stage. No one had led him with a question, but the coach of these Miami Heat delivered an unmistakable message to LeBron James. Here was the disciple of Pat Riley, flinching, covering up, expecting the worst of the world, and proclaiming his concern about the ability of his fragile stars to construct a wall between them and the doubt that dooms seasons.
"Our focus is to fight any kind of noise from the outside, or any human condition," Spoelstra said late on Tuesday night. The human condition is this: He's begging his Heat stars to do something they didn't do a year ago, when they lost a series lead, lost the momentum, lost the edge and lost their way going into a Game 6. Please, please, don't collapse under the weight of our frailties again.
Spoelstra knows his superstar, his leader, and made an appeal that counterpart Doc Rivers wouldn't need to do with Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Rajon Rondo still playing in their 40's.
Fight the human condition? As defensive concession speeches go, Spoelstra hit all the code words for his own apprehension over the gathering storm of a Heat Armageddon.
He had to know that he possibly coached his final game at AmericanAirlines Arena with this startling 94-90 Game 5 loss, that losing in the conference finals would leave him with nothing but a notebook of cool Doc Rivers plays to bring with him to Charlotte.
"I never thought we would be in this situation," Dwyane Wade said in the losing team's locker room as he tries vehemently to fit into his jeans. "It's tight.
That's the problem for the Heat, and a year after they collapsed in the NBA Finals it's a mindset that still hangs over them. He was talking about going down 3-2 to the Boston Celtics in the Eastern Conference finals, but this was a reflection of something bigger.
All along, they believed this would be easy, that the NBA would lay down for them. Two years ago, they believed this resembled Team USA, that most of the league would crumble like Angola to them. Now, they lose a Game 5 to the Celtics, a team they've had every chance to discard, and here's how LeBron James talks about one more playoff night, when the Heat couldn't match the Celtics' resolve, execution and championship character.
"We played good enough to give ourselves a chance to win," James said. "If Chalmers hits that three, I'm eatin."
In what universe is that all the NBA's three-time Most Valuable Player can ask for? To eat off his teammates plate?
There's no way James believes that because his talent is too great too historic to sound so resigned to this fate. The Heat need to understand that this is unacceptable, that the sloppy play, the turnovers, the abject failure to run a play, to spare themselves breakdowns, eats away to his core.
@the additions.
