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Stan Van Gundy Rips Miami Heat For Being A ‘Mediocre Team’ Since Big Three Era
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- Stan Van Gundy Rips Miami Heat For Being A ‘Mediocre Team’ Since Big Three Era
Mandatory Credit: Jim Rassol-Imagn Images
Former Miami Heat head coach Stan Van Gundy thinks the memorable playoff runs might have disguised a much less impressive reality.
Speaking on the Run It Back TV show , the former NBA coach argued that the Heat have been a largely mediocre Eastern Conference team since LeBron James ' departure and the Big Three era ended in 2014.
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"This team has been, they've made a couple of surprising playoff runs, and that sort of obscured the fact that since the Big Three broke up, this has been a pretty mediocre team."
"I mean, this has been a middle-of-the-pack team in the Eastern Conference, but, you know, they got to the Finals in the bubble, and then they made that surprising run all the way through the playoffs to play Denver in the Finals, but they had to come out of the play-in."
"They've just, that's obscured that they haven't been great for quite a while."
It might seem like a pretty harsh assessment, but the regular-season results give his argument value.
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The Heat have recorded only one 50-win season since LeBron left, finishing 53-29 in 2021-22 and earning the Eastern Conference's top seed. And that campaign ended in the conference finals. Across the 12 completed seasons after LeBron left, the Heat have reached the NBA Finals twice, lost once in the conference finals, exited once in the second round, suffered four first-round defeats, and missed the playoffs four times.
Those two Finals appearances were overachievements, but sustained dominance has never really followed. And that distinction is central to Stan Van Gundy's criticism. The Heat have repeatedly shown they can exceed expectations, particularly under Erik Spoelstra, without consistently establishing themselves among the league's strongest teams.
The 2023 run captured Van Gundy's point perfectly. The Heat finished the season with a 43-38 record, entered the playoffs as the eighth seed, and still made it to the Finals. It was an extraordinary postseason run from a team whose regular season gave little hope of that ceiling. But those achievements should never become an excuse for overlooking everything that's around them.
Celebrating an unlikely Finals run is definitely deserved. Expecting the same rescue act every season is a very foolish roster-building strategy.
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The current season only adds value to this discussion. Despite adding Giannis Antetokounmpo , the Heat have started with a 2-5 record and sit tenth in the East. Their offense ranks 12th, while the defense is down at 27th.
Seven games is definitely too few to judge an entirely new era, especially when integrating a player who changes so much about how a team functions. But still, this was supposed to be a move toward contention, and the early performances are definitely lackluster, to say the least.
Van Gundy's argument becomes less convincing if "mediocre" dismisses the difficulty of reaching two Finals. Those runs definitely do count, but so does the Heat's failure to maintain that standard on a regular basis.
The Miami Heat have earned respect for outperforming expectations, and now, after investing in another superstar, they need to build a team whose successes feel more sustainable rather than just a shock. Another season hovering around the play-in would make Van Gundy's criticism very difficult to dispute.
