I texted my friend asking for his official prediction tonight. He said "'Heat' by very little." He didn't ask me for my prediction and I didn't make one. I didn't like the circumstances. Same matchup from just Saturday night; they sat out their two biggest stars and were missing their third to injury; same name on the front of the jersey, different ones on the back. The circumstances were just weird and prognosticators get the yips with weirdness.
But as the game progressed--and my posts tell no lies--I was very confident. As I wrote, "I don't think they can catch us", and that is what I truly believed. Cleve. would close, even tie, we'd inch ahead again; our lead would expand to double digits, and our largest of the night, 14, was with 5' left in the 3rd. But I did notice that we were not pulling away.
My read was that in the first 2 1/2 quarters the players were quiescent, confident--as I was--that this version of Sensitive City could not beat this version of New Miami. We were sloppy with the ball and our shots weren't falling. That could be the basketball gods reminding a team to stay humble and hungry. OR, it could be we got dead legs and were not doing the hard work on defense, nor the crisp passing necessary to sustain a high-energy offense, because we were out of octane. I don't know for sure from reading the game. To a standard of only more probable than not my belief in the moment was that we let them hang around when we could have put them away. And then in the last half of the 3rd and the entire 4th, we simply ran out of gas. The Sensitives were certainly rested in that 4th quarter! lol. Those may be totally wrong reads but they were my reads in real time. Still, I confess that even when we got down by one, then three in the 4Q, I was confident Spo would kick life back into the players in those two FTOs. By then though Big Mo was all with Lake Mistake and to their credit they made NO DOUBT of the outcome. It was a thoroughly embarrassing 4Q for New Miami.
Really, my take is summed up by what I wrote earlier: "This stuff happens in the NBA."