Adversity only helped us get stronger: Dwyane Wade and Erik Spoelstra
On Thursday night, the Miami Heat took the penultimate step towards fulfilling their championship dream, when they knocked out the regular-season best Chicago Bulls to qualify for the National Basketball Association (NBA) Finals.
Miami will now take on the Dallas Mavericks in the best-of-seven series, starting from Tuesday, May 31, 2011.
This past one year for the Miami Heat has been an year of pain and hate. Ever since LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh combined their talents at the South Beach, the Heat have endured the wrath of fans, every where they played.
That was not all though. After promising their fans multiple championships in the pre-season, Miami’s journey to the Finals has been a rather hot and cold.
Their season started with a loss when they couldn’t match the prowess and chemistry of the Boston Celtics’ big-3. They won some after that, but soon the lack of chemistry between James, Wade and Bosh started to surface. The Heat
went on a six-game losing streak and as a result, rumours started going around that the Heat Coach Erik Spoelstra could be sacked due to the poor performance of the team. Miami faltered down the stretch time and time again against elite teams of the league
during the losing streak.
The Heat recovered though and when they beat the Los Angeles Lakers on Christmas Eve, the world saw the first glimpses of the tilt in the power centre of NBA. But, the Heat faltered again and this time, their struggles came very
near to the playoffs. A five game losing slump in March saw the Heat failing to execute down the stretch and they simply weren’t able to close games out. The tailspin not only dented Miami’s chances to grab the number one spot in the conference, but also led
to Dwayne Wade questioning his role in role in the clutch.
But all vicissitudes only made Heat strong and here they are, on the cusp of achieving glory. This is exactly what Wade and a Filipino-American basketball coach believe. At the end of a victory in game-5 of the series, Wade said
that the struggles early in the season helped them to make the team capable of reaching their destiny.
Wade said, “Right off the bat, beginning of the year, starting off 9-8, we all said in the locker room “We start off 17-0, 16-1, that’s not the best thing for this team.” We needed to go through something, we needed to look ourselves
in the mirror and see if we were really committed to this.”
The Miami Coach who has impressed all with his rotations and tactics in the conference finals expressed same sort of feelings in his postgame press conference.
“It’s quite well documented during the regular season we struggled in close games, the reality is we had to go through a process. We’ve been saying that since the beginning of the year. We had a team of nine new players, a lot
of new components, we were trying to build a team philosophy, a defensive system, and work on building a half-court system where the guys felt comfortable. We had to go through a lot of adversities.
Going through different struggles during the season is not the guarantee to reach the finale, as many teams like the Boston Celtics have found out, but Heat have clicked at just the right time and now find themselves four games
away from the NBA World Championship.
If the Heat do manage to topple the Mavs in the Finals, it may well be a start of a legacy.
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