Miami Heat Lukewarm At Best by Anthony Aprile

            Perhaps the biggest sports story of the summer, the NBA’s Miami Heat acquiring LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh through free agency, doesn’t seem to be paying the league or the team any great dividends just over a month into the season.

The South Beach Super Team that was supposed to be dominating the league by this time is trudging along at 12-8 leading up to a big game Saturday night against the Atlanta Hawks that will most likely be a battle for 2^nd place in the Southeast Division.  This group is certainly not looking like the Heat that everyone expected to be instant champions or the team that Jeff Van Gundy predicted would break the Chicago Bull’s regular season win record of 72.  To achieve that at this point, the Heat would have to lose only 1 of their next 62 games.  Simply put, that’s not happening.

            Plagued by injuries and less-than-stellar performance from the new Big Three, the Heat are a mere 3 games above .500 and currently sit in 5^th place in the Eastern Conference.  All of that hard work in free agency hasn’t quite paid off yet.  With Wade battling minor injuries, Bosh getting beat by opposing centers in the post, and role players Mike Miller and Udonis Haslem lost to more severe and long-term injuries, the depleted lineup is having great difficulty molding together.  To be fair, the Heat are under unprecedented scrutiny from the media, the league, and the fans, but this was something the players knew would happen before they signed.

            What makes this situation most interesting is the fact that two players who spent the summer pouting that they wanted to join Amare Stoudemire in New York to form their own All-Star triumvirate have seen their teams perform better than the Super Friends of South Beach.  Chris Paul and Carmelo Anthony, playing for the New Orleans Hornets and Denver Nuggets, respectively, have gotten off to great starts with the teams they so desperately wanted to leave this summer.  Paul’s Hornets began the season with an shocking 8-0 run, and haven’t lost much momentum since then, boasting a 13-5 record that would take 3^rd place if they belonged to the surprisingly weak Eastern Conference.  The Nuggets are sitting in 7^th in an incredibly strong Western Conference with an 11-6 record, which gives them a better win percentage than that of the Heat.

            Who knows when this team will find their rhythm, if ever?  We all thought we would see the high-flying trio that won gold at the 2008 Olympic Games, but it seems to be taking longer than expected.  Only time will tell what is in store for Miami’s Big Three, but the end result might not be what we all thought it would be.