The Heat are the first defending champion to be swept in history, and the championship was indeed controversial.

On May 15, the Miami Heat were swept by the Denver Nuggets with a huge gap of 4-0 in the 2023 NBA Finals, becoming the first champion team in NBA history to face a finals sweep in the defending season. Behind this humiliating record is the result of the interweaving of multiple factors, from the imbalance of the lineup structure to the decline of the core players, and then to the strong rise of the opponent, this controversial road to defending the title has been created.

Looking back at the Heat in the 2022-23 season, its journey to defend its title has laid hidden dangers from the beginning. The management failed to effectively strengthen the inside line during the offseason, and PJ Tucker's departure made a gap in the team's defensive system, and Oladipo's repeated injuries weakened the depth of the bench. In the regular season, the Heat barely squeezed into the playoffs with a record of 44 wins and 38 losses, with a winning rate of 53.7% setting the third-worst record in the history of defending NBA champions. The famous basketball analyst Zach Lowe pointed out in The Ringer: "The Heat rely too much on the dual-core drive of Butler and Adebayo. When facing the three-dimensional offense and defense of Nuggets Jokic + Murray + Gordon, this singularity is infinitely amplified. "

The miracle journey of the playoffs covers up the team's structural problems. In the first round, he advanced through the playoffs, and completed the "Black Eight Miracle" in the second round, eliminating the Bucks, the number one in the league, and won three consecutive games in a desperate situation of 0-3. These dramatic wins consumed too much physical fitness. Data shows that the Heat have played 22 games in the playoffs, 5 more games than the Nuggets. In the G1 of the finals, the Heat's three-point shooting percentage plummeted to 25.7%, a season-low, revealing the consequences of physical exhaustion. Former NBA player Kendrick Perkins bluntly stated on ESPN show: "They are like racing cars that run out of the last drop of oil, relying on their willpower to reach the finish line but they are hard to accelerate anymore. "

The controversy caused by the referee's penalty scale has always lingered in this series. In the last moment of G2, Jokic's block against Adebayo was questioned as a disturbance, but the referee did not call the ball; in G3, the Heat were called 26 fouls, 9 more than the Nuggets. The NBA official referee report in the last two minutes showed that there were 7 key missed judgments in four games, 5 of which were not conducive to the Heat. These details sparked heated discussions on social media, and the topic #NotMyChampion once topped the Twitter trend list. However, Nuggets coach Ma Long's rebuttal also has basis: "We averaged 11.5 points per game, which is not a gap that can be determined by several penalty decisions. "

The problem of lineup aging was infinitely magnified in the finals. Lowry's movement speed dropped significantly, and his defensive efficiency fell to the bottom of the playoffs; although Love, 33, had a positive fight, his rebound protection rate was only 42% when facing Jokic. In contrast, the Nuggets, Jokic (28 years old) and Murray (26 years old) who were in their year of playing can contribute 54.3 points per game. Sports medicine expert Jeff Stotts analyzed: "The average age of the Heat's main rotation players is 30.4 years old, 3.2 years older than the Nuggets, which is almost a fatal injury in modern basketball, which emphasizes speed conversion. "

The management's decision-making mistakes are also to blame. After winning the championship in 2022, the Heat chose to retain their original team and signed veterans such as Dedmond with only basic salary. Compared with the Nuggets' operations of introducing high-quality puzzles such as Pope and Brown, Heat general manager Andy Ellisberg's conservative strategy has been questioned. Sports Illustrated disclosed that the Heat had the opportunity to get OG Anunobi through a transaction, but was unwilling to pay the price of two first-round picks. Pat Riley, president of basketball operations, made a profound statement in the documentary Heat Culture: "Sometimes the biggest risk is that he is unwilling to take risks. "

This sweep ending has a profound impact on the historical narrative of the NBA. It breaks the inherent perception that "the defending champion must be competitive" and also triggers discussions about the modern basketball team building model. Famous commentator Stephen A. Smith pointed out: "This result proves that iron-blooded culture alone cannot make up for the talent gap, and the Heat need to be completely rebuilt. "But coach Spolstra's words in the documentary may bring revelation: "Greatness does not lie in never falling, but in redefining itself every time he falls. "The Heat today is like the Lakers who were swept in 2011, and the shameful record may become the starting point for Nirvana rebirth.

From a more macro perspective, this sweep exposed the drastic changes in the NBA competitive ecology. In the past decade, only the Warriors in 2018 and the Nuggets in 2023 can maintain their core lineup health after winning the championship. Under the new salary policy, the living space of the "Dynasty Team" is being greatly compressed. Perhaps the Heat's story is not only a failure of a team, but also a microcosm of the iteration of basketball philosophy - when Jokic won the championship with an all-round performance of 30.2 points, 14 rebounds and 7.2 assists per game, the collision between the traditional "tough guy basketball" and "all-round center" concepts has long been tied outside the score.