I may be wrong of course; Spo would deny it but there have been weirdnesses in him publicly that I have not seen before: his recent admission that “We wanted Cleveland” two years after LBJ left (he wanted to crush LeBron; his acknowledgment that there was “a lot of pent up stuff” against Boston; his tearing up at the EC trophy presentation and then when Bam gave a revealing look behind closed doors after that G6 loss (at the very tip top of my own personal sports pain)—that Spo had showed an inspirational video the next day; his physically grab of Ernie Johnson and overtalk, refusing to answer what the vid was; his unique going-off on uber-respected, longtime ESPN NBA analyst Ramona Shelburne after Denver G2, telling her, rubbing his eyes, that her legitimate, and probably spot-on, observation of how Spo had defended fat boy was “ridiculous”, and “the product of an untrained eye” (there are no better trained eyes than Ramona) (he later texted her an apology); and now this. Read this and tell me Spoelstra does not have a hate fire of uncertain but definite origin burning inside him.
It was late Sunday night inside the bowels of the Ball Arena, in that long hallway that connects the Denver Nuggets’ locker room and the visitor’s space that’s occupied by the maniacal Miami Heat in these NBA Finals. Heat coach Erik Spoelstra was on one end, making that long walk from a postgame press conference that went two questions longer than he would have liked. Nuggets guard Jamal Murray, whose evening had been ruined by Spoelstra’s adjustments in Miami’s series-tying Game 2 win, was on the other.
As the two men marched in each other’s direction in that mostly-empty corridor, it was only natural to wonder if they would acknowledge one another in the kind of mutual admiration society way that had been the norm between these teams to this point.
…
So here they were after the 111-108 decision in favor of the Heat was done, some 50 feet apart and walking with similar stoicism and pace. Forty feet. Then 30. Twenty. Ten. Their shoulders nearly bumped as they passed, but their mouths did not move. The silence was as loud and clear a sign as any that there had been a massive mood shift in this series.
Here come the Heat.
…
But beyond the obviousness of the end result, it was the weirdness of Denver’s postgame vibrations,…the Nuggets sounded like a team that was as stunned, and perhaps even shook, as the building full of fans that were so furious that they had to, well, take that ‘L’ on the way out.
[Text msg I sent my family at 10:41 pm after G2:
[DENVER IS SHOOK! They led by as many as 15, 8 going into the 4Q and we beat them to a PULP in that quarter before holding off a frantic, panicked counter-comeback. Miami now in control of this series.]
“Fuck the Heat!” so many of them chanted in the stairwells as they flooded onto the street.
