http://www.pinoybasketballaddicts.net/2011/05/lebron-wade-provide-league-mvp-lesson.html
CHICAGO—They don’t even remember what happened. They don’t remember what they just did. It was so fast and furious, and LeBron James and Dwyane Wade had elevated so high that it was almost an out-of-body, out-of-mind experience.
“For the first time, my mind was free,” Wade said.
“We want to watch the last four minutes of that game (again),” James said.
What happened? They happened. The Decision happened. The Miami Heat happened. They beat the Chicago Bulls to advance to the NBA Finals with an incredible finish, giving the ultimate example, and reminder, of what superstardom is in the NBA.
It was a process, a long and painful road of teaching defense and teamwork, of learning from the highs and lows of a season. That’s what Miami coach Erik Spoelstra said.
Funny, because to me it looked like James and Wade looking at each other with 3:14 left, trailing Chicago by 12, and deciding: OK. Now.
LeBron James and the Miami Heat are going to The NBA Finals after a late rally to close out the series and take Game 5 from the CHicago Bulls, 83-80. (AP Photo)
And then, well, wow. The Heat went on an 18-3 run, with eight points each from James and Wade. The Bulls’ star, Derrick Rose, kept missing, throwing the ball away, fouling. In one 60 1/2-second stretch, Wade had a four-point play and a rebound while James scored five points and had a steal, an assist, a rebound.
Before that, Wade had been awful the whole night. James struggled in crunch time throughout the regular season.
“(Wade) has got something different, a different makeup inside of him that he’s able to rise to the occasion regardless of what’s happening during the course of the game,” Spoelstra said. “And he’s proven that so many times, where he may have struggled for a game or even parts of a game, but when it’s winning time, there’s really not many players that are better.”
If you are still hoping for The Decision to fail, time is running out.
The Heat open The Finals against Dallas at home on Tuesday.
But James, Wade and Chris Bosh didn’t assemble a team just to reach the NBA Finals. Still, on Thursday, they combined to score all but 14 of the Heat’s points.
Spoelstra is right to some extent. At the start of the year, these guys couldn’t figure out how to play together.
But it all worked out eventually. It was a process. We have seen groups of NBA stars fail together in the Olympics.
That said, we just got another lesson that in the NBA, the team with the most and best stars wins. Miami has more stars than Dallas, too.
“Sometimes, you have to will it,’’ Bulls coach Tom Thibodeau said. “It’s a hustle play here, a hustle play there. That’s the difference.”
No. The Bulls hustled all they could. These final three minutes took me back to April in Houston, where Connecticut, with the stars, beat Butler, with teamwork, defense and hustle, in the NCAA national title game.
The Bulls missed about as many shots at Butler did.
I overstated that. This game was played 50 levels higher than the college one. But in the end, the message was the same: In basketball, the little engine really can’t.
I’ll never make the mistake again of thinking the little guy can win. This will be hard for Chicago, the city, to understand. It is used to Michael Jordan making the final shot, Patrick Kane scoring the winning goal. James said that people remember your failures more than your successes, but I disagree. It’s hard to remember Jordan failing at all.
But in Game 4 of this series, Rose had a chance to win at the end of regulation, isolating on James, and couldn’t score. And now on Thursday, Rose fell apart with the rest of the Bulls in that final 3:14. He even missed a free throw with 26.7 seconds left that would have tied the game. The result of carrying a team all year?
“I wasn’t tired,” Rose said. “Just making dumb decisions. I’m going to get better; I’m not worried about that. If anything, this is going to make me hungry.”
I believe it. Rose already was the league’s MVP this year for the regular season. But in the playoffs, he still has (had?) a bit of a learning curve to go. He still is not a superstar at the level of James and Wade.
In fact, James and Wade provided him a class. Superstar 101.
“We honestly don’t know what happened,” James said. “We know some big plays happened and we know we won the game. It went so fast.”
They can’t remember. Chicago will never forget.
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