The Miami HEAT couldn’t have found a better time to string some wins together. Had they lost a nail-biter to Indiana last Friday and fell to Chicago on Sunday, they might be sitting on the outside looking in on the playoff race. But they pulled through in ways they hadn’t been earlier in the season, and with the Milwaukee Bucks coming to town on Tuesday – not to mention the teams below them dealing with various injuries – the HEAT have a chance to keep pulling themselves up the ladder rather than keep hanging on.
But you don’t really care about that today, do you? Today, all you and anyone else with any ties to South Florida probably want to talk about is Mr. Triple Dozen. The Bright Side. Hassanity. Or what have you.
While this has hardly been an unsuccessful season for the HEAT, the players will probably be the first ones to tell you that things have been a bit of a grind. Between the lack of consistency with keeping guys on the court and the unexpected home losses scattered throughout, the team has perpetually been stuck on the edge of turning things around without actually doing so. That’s a frustrating place to be, and that frustration has sapped a little fun out of the season. Or had, rather, until recently.
Sunday was important for Miami’s playoff standing, sure, but it might have been just as important for the added value of joy. For an afternoon, at least, the basketball world was captivated by Hassan Whiteside as he became the first player to record a triple-double with points, rebounds and blocks in 25 minutes or less in at least 30 years.
And it may have just been the most important game Whiteside has played.
We’re working a bit on theory here, as this is tough to outright prove, but as much as we think that everyone deals in numbers and facts as they make decisions in this league, reputation can be just as important as a form of currency. Even if a player is having a very poor shooting season, it’s often months or even years before teams defend him as a poor shooter as long as he had the reputation as a good one. And even if a coach schemes to lay off that player, it can be hard to fight instincts in the heat of the moment.
Whiteside has been dealing with a bit of the reputation game. He’s putting up 5.8 blocks per 36 minutes and the highest block percentage in league history – in still-limited minutes – but players are still challenging him at the rim despite barely shooting 40 percent against him at the cup.
Now he’s put up 12 blocks, in every which way imaginable, against one of the best teams in the Eastern Conference in a prime Sunday afternoon slot on national television. And with no football on, to boot.
Now that everyone has seen him, will they be trying to dunk around him in the future?
Even after Whiteside had already topped half a dozen blocks, including three on Taj Gibson, the Bulls were still going right at him and Gibson was still trying to post him up until the game’s final minutes. Teams will never fully stop challenging Whiteside because that’s the only way to get him into foul trouble, even though that can disrupt an offensive system, but this is the sort of game that makes people second guess – that makes people feel your presence when you’re around.
He’s also shooting 67.4 percent from the floor, something that separates him from some of the elite shot blockers of yore, but players are still letting him run relatively unchecked to the rim and not putting a body on him consistently in the paint.
Now that everyone has seen him, will he be enjoying as much breathing room down low?
Reputation goes both ways, of course. If everyone knows – we’re referring to reputation among players just as much as scouting reports – that he can block and finish, they know Whiteside is averaging five fouls per 36 minutes as well. That’s perfectly normal for a player who has as few NBA minutes under his belt as Whiteside, but getting that number down is the difference between being a 20-minute player and a 30-minute player.
Fortunately, while Whiteside was still eager to hit the ball out of the air on Sunday, he made a couple of nice plays staying on the ground and staying vertical.
Where Whiteside goes from here, who is to say? When a player goes from working out at a YMCA to putting up previously-unseen numbers, there isn’t exactly a blueprint to follow. The HEAT will continue to use him as a rim-diving, vertical-spacing, rim-protecting center just as they have with Chris Andersen – who himself filled a role best exemplified by Tyson Chandler – but this is just the beginning of Whiteside’s story.
For him, Chicago set the foundation for what could be a very useful reputation. For the team, it was a reason to celebrate in a season that hasn’t always had one. Whether it’s a brief respite or not is up to the HEAT, but however this season plays out in Miami, it appears they’ve found someone special. Someone who will matter beyond the next four months.
Stats courtesy NBA.com/Stats and Basketball-Reference.com