Someone Want To Explain The Heat To Me?

Miami struggles at home. Mario Chalmers isn’t committed to his team. Dwyane Wade’s fat. And then you steamroll the conference champions and it all goes away for a day.

So that was unexpected, to say the least. Orlando looked awful while Miami looked pretty darn good, on the way to a 104-86 victory.

This was one of the games I’d asked for at the beginning of the season. Smooth. Consistent.

Executed at a high level. Non-heart-attack inducing. And lo and behold, that’s precisely what we got against one of Miami’s marquee opponents.

via Didn’t see that coming: Miami Heat roll over Orlando Magic, 104-86 | Hot Hot Hoops.

I don’t get this club. I really don’t.  On the one hand, I thought that preseason prognostications of them falling back into the lottery were overkill. Having a top-three player in the game when two teams in your division don’t have a top 15 player between them is enough to win a handful more than you lose. And when they started out on fire, I was skeptical. I mean, yeah, they play together and I think QRich has actually been huge for them and JO is playing well, but come on. There’s no bench and no dynamic non-scorers And I’m a Dorrell Wright guy! So when they fell back to Earth last month, it made sense. Hang around the five to seven seed, make a little run towards a home-heavy part of the schedule, done in the first round.  But they keep dropping games like this, and it’s maddening.

They get clobbered by Denver, and get an unlucky bounce against the Lakers (unlucky because they didn’t have the last possession, because that’s what it came down to. Kobe’s shot had nothing to do with luck). They squeaked by the Kings in a game where they led the whole way but kept giving the Kings life, then get smacked in the face by Dallas. Then come out and yank down the pants of the defending Eastern Conference champions and kick them into the mud.

This is after they beat Denver in the early part of the season, downed Orlando less than three weeks ago, and in the middle got clobbered by OKC and Cleveland. Which team is it? The NBA eschews the notion of “any given day” because generally the best teams are the most consistent. But with the Heat, it really is any given day. They can knock off Orlando in a laugher after getting crushed by Memphis a few days ago. There’s no making sense of them.

Is that good or bad for their chances? You have to figure they’ll win more than they lose since they’re not dropping a lot of games to bad teams. They’re losing some games they should win, but not a majority, and they’re winning some games they should lose, but not a majority. Maybe by the time April rolls around that will be a boon, because even if they’re not very good, they can be good against anyone.

Oster-Tags: dwyane wade, Jermaine O'Neal, Miami Heat, Michael Beasley, Quinten Richardson, Udonis Haslem, whatinGodsnamearetheheatdoing?