When you survey the sweep of the Miami "Heat" season you are benumbed by the dreary, hope-murdering mediocrity.
One four-game win streak, two four-game losers. Three games below .500 is the worst we have been; seven games above the best. That was immediately followed by a four-game losing streak that brought us back closer to our mean. Six games over we were on March 22. Since, three straight L's.
Some of us saw this coming right out of the box. One guy, I documented it, lol'd at us. "Look at Miami "Heat" fans panicking after two losses lol." We were right, he was wrong.
What I have not been able to get "Heat" cognos and fannies to see is the wider sweep of the team's recent history. The drip-by-drip results this season have been an exercise in reversion to the mean but this season as a whole was a reversion to the mean of the nine seasons inclusive starting in 2014/15, the first season post-Heatles. A couple of months ago I taught myself, via Wikipedia, how to calculate the standard deviation of a data set. I don't know if it was worth the effort but I did it and the standard deviation of 2014/15-2021/22 is 5. For sports fans, including me, the more meaningful metric is average record: 45-37 (shortened seasons extrapolated over 82 games); expressed as a decimal, .544. That's amazing, isn't it? Amazingly consistent? If the "Heat" win all of their remaining games this season they will merely match their previous eight-year average. They can't do better than that average and they can't do worse than 40 wins. They finished 41-41 in 2016/17 ("Team Joy") and 39-43 in 2018/19, the closest analogs. They have not deviated much from their average in these nine years, -8 and +8 are the extremes! It is stunning consistency in the Darwinian world of team sports. Erik Spoelstra repeated the grand sports truth after last night's loss, "You are what your record says you are", and yeah.
My point in doing this, now and previously, is to put before "Heat" fans in irrefutable black and white that Pat Riley, Erik Spoelstra and "Heat" "Culture", the three constants over these nine years, have destined the franchise to finish 45-37. Year after year after year. For the Charlotte "Hornets" that would get Riles and Spo a statue each outside the arena. For some other teams too, Sacramento, D.C. And it will get Riley a statue after he hangs it up. .544 means you were better than 54% of teams every year for nine straight years! Maybe that is how "Heat" fans should look at this history too, but we don't. We have been sold on Hope, on Riles, on another championship just around the corner. It's not happening; no championship is coming. Not until the "Culture" that has created 45-37 disappears and only the statue remains.
