The Miami Heat are the hardest-working team in today’s NBA. If you pay attention to the league, you will consistently hear this message. It’s an identity sold by the team, its players, and the media in and outside of Miami. The organization gets the best out of its players because of a militaristic approach to conditioning and a team-first attitude and tireless work ethic. This is “Heat Culture.” It’s not for everyone, only those willing to put in the work.
In Heat Culture, players are held accountable by their coaches and teammates, and vice versa. In March of this year, Jimmy Butler—the perfect avatar for Heat Culture—got into a public spat with head coach Erik Spoelstra and Heat lifer Udonis Haslem.
The Heat were losing to the Golden State Warriors, who were playing without Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green. After a 19-0 run by the Warriors, Butler began yelling at Spoelstra in the huddle. Haslem, backing up Spoelstra, threatened to fight Butler. In the postgame interview, Spoelstra explained the altercation by saying,“We have a competitive, gnarly group and we were getting our asses kicked.”
For any other team, such an incident would seem like a public fracturing, but for the Heat, it was framed as a positive consequence of their identity. By the next game, all three were smiling and joking together again.
Reading Chris Herring’s book Blood in the Garden: The Flagrant History of the 1990s New York Knicks is a good way to understand where the current iteration of Heat Culture comes from, and how the general worship, by commentators and fans, of toughness, grit, and other sports clichés emerged.
Pat Riley, the former Showtime Lakers coach, Knicks coach, and current Miami Heat president, made the New York Knicks into one of the premier teams of the 1990s by instituting a similar atmosphere of hard work, physicality, and a defense-first mentality. There was also an abiding element of violence and retribution, back when bare-knuckle aggression was still permitted in the league.
In the book, Riley and the Knicks are portrayed as almost mythical characters. They are giants among men whose failures and successes were born from their innate character. Herring’s history is supposed to be a moral tale about the way basketball used to be played, and the virtues that its commentators still hold up. But it also paints an image of a bygone time that is both romantic and archaic. It’s a time that is easy to look back on fondly because there has thankfully been tremendous progress made in terms of the care and protection of players—of their health, mental and physical.