It seems a foregone conclusion the Heat and Pacers will wind up meeting each other in the Eastern Conference finals later this summer.
With everyone else struggling to achieve mediocrity, the Heat and Pacers have been the class of the talent-challenged conference. Their dominance had reduced the regular season into a necessary exercise to occupy time until the playoffs arrive.
But Heat vs. Pacers to decide which team faces the Western Conference champ in the NBA Finals doesn’t seem as inevitable now that the Nets and Knicks look to be getting their acts together.
When the local teams were in the throes of awful starts to their respective seasons, making the playoffs wasn’t a given — much less actually being able to compete with the two-time defending NBA champion Heat in the playoffs.
But the Knicks have no reason to fear the Heat after beating them 102-92 Thursday night at the Garden for their third straight win over Miami and fourth in five games. Now the Nets have earned some swagger after beating the Heat 104-95 in double overtime Friday night at Barclays Center.
It was the Nets’ fifth straight victory in 2014 and their second over the Heat this season after a 101-100 victory way back on Nov. 1.
“It’s tough in this league,” Miami coach Erik Spoelstra said of the Heat’s back-to-back losses in New York. “It’s tough coming off success and it’s tough coming off failure. [We] think the competition is getting better. By the time we get to the spring, our game has to be at a different level.”
The Nets (15-21) have taken their game to a different level. But he Heat played without Dwyane Wade, Mario Chalmers and Shane Battier, and LeBron James fouled out in the first overtime after scoring 36 points. Nevertheless, the Nets earned their victory and continue to show improvement despite playing without Brook Lopez and Deron Williams.
“For my guys to fight for 58 minutes, it was a win we needed,” Nets coach Jason Kidd said.
Players wore nicknames on the backs of their jerseys and it was JJ, Big Ticket and Truth leading the Nets. JJ, as in Joe Johnson, started off by scoring 22 of his 32 points in the first quarter, while Kevin Garnett (12 points, 10 rebounds) and Paul Pierce (23 points) kept up the kind of intensity “King” James and J. Shuttlesworth (Ray Allen) could not overcome.
“It was a gutsy win,” Johnson said. “We were very resilient.”
It might have been a regular season game, but it was a reminder the Nets, like the Knicks, could haunt the Heat in a playoff series.
It’s why Spoelstra went into the game turning up the sense of urgency to leave Brooklyn with a win and change the Heat’s New York karma. James tried to rally Miami late but wound up fouling out for the first time in a regular -season game since 2008.
“We played the right basketball at the end of the game,” Nets forward Andrei Kirilenko said.
Spoelstra saw first-hand Thursday night how the Knicks have improved their play. He saw Friday night how the Nets have improved theirs.
“They’re playing with more confidence now,” Spoelstra said. “The season is a long season. When they were going through their struggles and everybody was ready to make strong conclusions about them and everybody else in the Eastern Conference, I just rolled my eyes. It was way too early and way too premature.
“They have a lot of talent and they were going through a lot of adversity. But things can change. All of sudden you get confidence, you get continuity, your outlook changes. Everything can change in a snap of a finger.”
The Heat are gearing for the playoffs. But with the Knicks and Nets looking improved, maybe the matchup in the Eastern Conference finals isn’t such a foregone conclusion after all.