Not 5, not 6, not 7: How should we remember the Heatles?

On the 10th anniversary of the infamous Miami Heat welcome party, we reminisce on what made the Heatles a tale of both great success and tremendous failure.

Surely, you remember where you were when LeBron James announced his decision to take his talents to South Beach to join the Miami Heat. Some people were at a bar. Some still stuck at work. But as a 14-year-old Cleveland native, I watched from my living room sofa, teary-eyed, as my childhood hero disemboweled the city in which I was raised.

Unlike many other crazed sports fanatics, however, I reasonably understood why LeBron left.

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I wasn’t a part of the immediate jersey-burning ceremonies, nor did I dump my hundreds of pieces of LeBron memorabilia into the trash. Was I disappointed? That’s putting it lightly. Was I confused as to why he needed a genuinely embarrassing television spectacle to spurn our constantly beaten-down city? You bet I was. But to hate someone for leaving a bad situation in pursuit of their own goals? Even as a kid, I knew that was wrong. Not once did I utter the James name in a bad light directly following his decision.

That is, of course, until the self-proclaimed Heatles decided to hold the Big 3 welcome party just 24 hours later.

When I woke up that following morning to ESPN airing clips from Miami’s shindig the night prior, my teenage angst flared up like the first time an early-90’s adolescent listened to Nirvana. My jaw dribbled to the floor as LeBron, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh haughtily strutted onto a stage through the guise of blasting fog machines before ever having played a minute together. Most notably, I hurled expletive-laced remarks at my television as SportsCenter looped James asserting his infamous “not five, not six, not seven” anecdote. Even with LeBron becoming Cleveland’s savior following the 2016 NBA Finals, I still cannot help but roll my eyes at that statement.

But now, on the 10-year anniversary of that unforgettable event at American Airlines Arena, and with all the events that have taken place within the league since the Heatles banded together, looking back on that Miami Heat team has become a perplexing exercise.

For a team with as much superstar talent as the Heat carried, James’ “not five” comment, though extremely arrogant, seemed oddly realistic. Looking around the Eastern Conference at that time, who could we reasonably expect to stop the Heat from reaching the Finals? The up-and-coming but brittle Bulls? The declining Celtics? With all due respect to the Boston’s and the Chicago’s and the Orlando’s of the NBA, there wasn’t a thing they could do to prevent the inevitable.

And once Miami reached the Finals, what then? Up until that point, league history had told us that the Finals team with the best player typically went on to hoist the trophy. LeBron was the best player in the league, and Dwyane Wade ranked, at the very least, fourth on that list. Hell, at the time, Chris Bosh would have been the best player on half of the teams in the NBA! There was not a foreseeable future in which the Miami Heat would fail to reach their ultimate goal.

Only they did.

To take a page from LeBron’s book, the Heatles failed to win titles during not one, but two seasons in their brief four-year stint. Though they managed to win two championships, their second title victory over the San Antonio Spurs was one bad bounce away from resulting in yet another Finals letdown. Imagining a world in which that Heat team had only won one title in four years is absolutely preposterous, but people forget that it was this close to happening.

Regardless, winning back-to-back titles is an accomplishment that few teams have ever achieved. Those Heat squads were incredible to watch, and when they were at the peak of their offensive and defensive powers, it was wiser to get out of the way than to be steamrolled by the unstoppable force that was. One could certainly consider them a top-10 team of all-time, and for that, they should be proud.

Unfortunately, however, many will never remember the Heatles for their historic 27-game winning streak, or their free-flowing style of play, or their lockdown defense, or their mind-bending fast breaks, or the championships they delivered. Most people will continue to hark back to that damning proclamation on the night of the welcome party.

“Not five, not six, not seven…”

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While those Heat teams were something like the league had never seen before, that statement alone makes it easy to feel as though maybe—just maybe—those Heat teams underachieved. To have two of the top-four players in the league during a time in which the NBA was getting over a terrible decade of basketball should result in championships. To say the Heat weren’t successful is inherently false, but to win only two titles? No matter which way you slice it, their piece of the pie was not big enough.

Being such a paradoxical team—one that accrued both tremendous achievements and disappointing failures—the Heatles can be remembered for any number of things. How we choose to remember them is entirely up to us, but if there is one thing that requires mentioning of that Miami Heat team, it is this:

They changed basketball forever.

They popularized the ever-prevalent idea of a ‘big-three,’ reinvented the dynamic of roster building, and forced the entire league to adapt to a smaller and faster style of play. Most importantly, however, the Heatles—and most notably, LeBron James—birthed the player-empowerment era.

Whether or not you support superstars jettisoning out of bad situations to a team with brighter aspirations is your prerogative. Without that Miami run, though, the NBA very well might be stuck where it was last decade—an era of slow, grueling, drag-it-out basketball with little star power and few die-hard followers.

Say what you want about the early-2010’s Miami Heat, but because of their on-court performance and their progressive thinking that we have grown accustomed to seeing today, the league we love is in a much better place.

We may not have liked them, but we owe them thanks for that much.