LYNNE SLADKY/ AP PHOTO
LeBron James throws down a dunk against the Chicago Bulls in Game 2 of Eastern Conference semifinals.
It doesn't matter whether you love the Miami Heat or hate them. You watch them. They are the team in professional sports, at least in this country, to talk the most about. People still call the Yankees the Evil Empire. They’re not, they don’t generate the emotion they used to one way or another, even when they're going good the way they are now. The Heat are the Yankees now.
LeBron James is the biggest star we have in sports and the Heat are the star team, more than the Yankees or any other baseball team, more than the Lakers and Celtics, more than any team in pro football.
They give off the most heat, in all ways.
Michael and the Bulls were the headliners once and then Torre’s Yankees and then it was Tiger Woods. As great as Tom Brady’s Patriots were when they were winning three Super Bowls, they were never that kind of team. LeBron and the Heat are, until somebody knocks them off the way the Bulls are trying hard to knock them off right now.
Of course they haven’t won the way the Yankees have, or the Lakers, or the Celtics. They might not win this year, have a ways to go before they even get to the conference finals. And maybe the Knicks, if they can get by the Pacers, can clip them in the conference finals, telling themselves that if the Bulls can play LeBron and them this tough, the Knicks have the talent to play them a whole lot tougher.
But as good as these NBA playoffs have been, as much fun as it has been watching Steph Curry and the underdog and undermanned Bulls and Carmelo Anthony, the best show in sports remains the Heat. The season is always more interesting when they have a game.
The best NBA season is the one where they keep going. Knick fans don’t want to hear that and shouldn’t want to hear it, they want to win, too. It has been four decades since they won it all. They look back at the regular season and remember how they looked against the Heat when the sides were even, and have a perfect right to say bring it on.
The Heat are a wonderful, flawed, totally compelling team. Miami has no real center (even if Chris Bosh had 20 points and 19 rebounds Friday) and no real point guard and still won 66 regular-season games, 27 of them in a row. Maybe Miami can’t make it two titles in a row if Dwyane Wade isn’t healthy. Maybe the Bulls have given the Knicks — who have more players than the Bulls, and who have Carmelo in a year when the Bulls don’t have Derrick Rose — great confidence that they can get four games off them in the playoffs the way they got three during the regular season.
Still: On Friday night, on the road, against a Bulls team going toe-to-toe with them despite all the players they have lost, you saw the athletic character of LeBron James and the athletic character of the team. It had been a bad shooting night for LeBron and then suddenly he stepped back and made a long three-pointer. And after Norris Cole, a kid having the playoff night of his life on his way to 18 huge points, made a three of his own, there was LeBron to drive through the whole Bulls team to the basket and get fouled and make the free throw that made it 99-90 for his team, and game, set, match.
Later the Spurs would win a tremendous road game of their own at a time when they were being counted out again. But the show on this night was the way the Heat stood up against the Bulls. You can say it shouldn't be this hard for them against a Bulls team without Rose, Luol Deng, Kirk Hinrich. That’s not the way sports — basketball — works, when teams somehow find a way to play better than they really are. It is the way the Knicks played in the old days against the Lakers without Willis, when Dave Stallworth was the closest thing they had to a center.
The Bulls are trying to beat up James, as much as they want to call the best player on the planet a flopper, doing everything short of tackling him. They tried to do it Friday night, Nazr Mohammed shoving James the way he did and getting himself ejected. Somehow this is supposed to be the glory of playoff basketball, like some celebration of old-school values. In a pig’s eye, it is. People went at Michael Jordan hard. Not like it’s the corners in hockey.
“I’m here to play basketball,” James said when it was over.
Once again on Friday night, the basketball he played when the game was on the line was something to see. His team is the one to watch. LeBron and this Heat team have won only one title together. They might have to get to two the hard way, through a lot more hard fouls. They’re still the Yankees now. There is this team and all the other teams.
OH THOSE UMPIRES, JOE'S YANKS & IDZIK'S PLIGHT
If modern baseball umpires can’t identify a home run when they see it, why would you expect them to know that a relief pitcher has to face at least one batter?
Suddenly there is no better line in baseball than this:
Matt Harvey goes today.
The Orioles may not have a pure No. 1 starter, but I still think they’ve been the best all-around team in baseball this season.
And you better pay attention to the kid at third base, Manny Machado, because he is going to be a huge star for Buck Showalter for a long time.
By the way?
Buck being out of work for as long as he was after Texas is like the baseball-manager equivalent of 74 players being drafted before Russell Wilson last year.
Apparently those short arms of Justin Pugh that the draft geniuses lost their minds over haven’t turned out to be a tremendous hardship, at least so far.
So what’s the deal, the new Rutgers coach Eddie Jordan and LeBron have the same number of college degrees?
The managing that Joe Girardi has done so far this season is the best managing he’s ever done with the Yankees.
If the Yankees give Robinson Cano some kind of $200 million contract, they will be giving it to him at the same age Albert Pujols was when the Angels decided to give him 10 years and $240 million.
When do you think we’re going to start hearing that the great Mo Rivera, who looks pretty much as great as ever this season, is having second thoughts about this being his last season?
JONATHAN DANIEL/GETTY IMAGES
James and the Heat are focal point of the sports world.
Or does he stick to his guns and go out on top?
Miguel Cabrera of the Tigers continues to be one of the great righthanded hitters of all time.
And the guy who has become the best hitter of his time.
By the way, do people still think that Mike Trout was the real MVP of the American League last season and not the guy who won the Triple Crown?
Can’t the Mets just trick Ike Davis into thinking it’s August?
The profiling of David Ortiz because he’s going good at his age sounds a lot like some of the chatter that Derek Jeter heard last season.
lYou know what Glenn Beck — who compared Michael Bloomberg to a Nazi last weekend at the NRA convention — has become?
A traveling minstrel show for the unstable and unhinged.
To paraphrase the great old line from my pal Liz Smith about the late Michael Jackson:
Who do you suppose gives Beck the creeps?
There is no disputing the fact that all the quick fixes the Jets made turned them into a mess, one that John Idzik was brought in to clean up.
It is still in the record books that the Jets went to two straight AFC Championship Games with Mike Tannenbaum as their general manager.
You can say they were lucky, and maybe they were, especially with the first one.
But it is not as if they were the first team in pro football history to ever get lucky on its way to the Final Four.
As the great Bill Parcells — who only made one AFC Championship Game with the New York Jets — always said, you are what your record says you are.
The Jets’ record was 8-8 the year before last and 6-10 last year.
It means that in the four years of Tannenbaum/Ryan, the Jets had the two championship games, one .500 season, and then their trip to Butt Fumble City.
It’s not as if these were the Isiah years of pro football, that’s all I’m saying.
Wait, you mean Geno Smith actually gets judged on his ability and the way he handles himself as a Jet from now on?
You mean, people are actually going to try to be fair and objective with the kid?
The new people in charge of the Dodgers must be under the impression that Don Mattingly is the one who bought all these players.
I am going to keep telling you this until the Open at Merion:
If Tiger doesn’t have to pull his driver out of his bag — sometimes he acts as if he’s more afraid to pull the driver cover off than he is of old girlfriends — then he is going to have a great chance to win his first major since Torrey Pines.
Happy Mother’s Day today to my wife, Taylor, who has been such a great and loving and wise mom to our four children.
And finally, to my own mom, Lee Lupica:
It continues to be a high honor of my life to call myself her son.
The Mike Lupica Show is heard Monday through Friday at noon and Sunday at 9 a.m. on ESPN-98.7.
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