Exits: When islands sink

Can the Heat sustain, as-is, much longer outside the league's weather?

I remember the way south Florida fit on all of us. Clinging affectionately, eager, the humidity making our skin glow. We’d get up in the mornings before the sun had really started to climb to shoot on the concrete court dug into the beach, diving for the ball like it’d go ricocheting into traffic instead of thumping down to settle in a mound of sand. No bounces. Four tall palms and not a splash of shade, the ocean a mirror close enough to blind us but far enough away that we’d scorch our feet trying for it and any relief. Anyway, it was like bath water.

At night, open air dives. Reaching into help-yourself tubs full of ice half melted down to fish out cans of beer, letting our hands linger until they numbed. Fingers slipping off the jukebox buttons, upper lips shining, peach of the streetlights pooling at our feet, gazing up at the International Swimming Hall of Fame across the street and then grabbing them around the waist before they could crash into the Atlantic and try, on bad faith dares from strangers, for the buoys blinking in the dark.

We were so close again. To be able to watch their faces change as clear and sudden and beautiful as the violent thunderstorms that would roll in each afternoon and out again in twenty minutes, everything drenched then drying in seconds. Steam. Sweat. Cheeks flushing red. The sweetness of their natures elevated, overripe, and the sharpness of them softened by all that salt in the air, a permanent haze.

Flanked by pastels, always a little wet, no real routine but to find each other and wait out the weather. What felt rare was recognizing the moments, while I was in them, for being pressing. I tend to shear huge swaths of memory and hang them as haphazard tapestries for myself to look back on but to these I took no blade, only felt the whole of that time imprinting in my mind, my chest, my stomach, branding me with all the neons south of Broward County. I’ve lost a lot in the last few years, can feel it sifting out of my mind in real time, but those few days of friendship and heat — never.

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The Miami Heat are, most of the time, an island. A franchise that tends to exist outside the league’s weather and skip most of its passing trends. If you want to talk about style, signature looks and feels, the Heat, league-wide, are at the top of the heap. Like style, you don’t need to enjoy or understand, all the time, what it is Miami is doing, what the team is trying for, but objectively you get it. Watching this team can be like catching sight of someone across the street who is clearly only dressed for themselves, their every step or motion propelled by that understanding. It’s a thrill to see people moving through the world like this because their conviction, how they wield and wear it (maybe just in that moment, maybe always) staves off life’s only constant: uncertainty. It’s why we can’t help but watch.

The Heat have this, but they also happen to be sustainably excellent at basketball. The rare years Erik Spoelstra’s teams have missed the postseason are one-off anomalies where the previous and next seasons the team is back within title distance as quick and dependably as the time between clear skies and a monsoon downpour in the city any afternoon between June to September. There are no droughts here.

Is life as an island lonely? To anybody but Jimmy Butler, Bam Adebayo, Kyle Lowry and Pat Riley, maybe. Butler and Lowry, despite being two of the most beloved (by other players, certainly; by fans, its specific) athletes in the league, have been islands within it forever. Butler, by virtue of ethics, his own, and Lowry by what started as a stubborn refusal to shed old categorizations of himself as a willing or not teammate that grew into a clever camouflage for a devout wholeheartedness only the people closest, or who really try to, can see past. Where Lowry and Butler navigated their way to this island over so many seasons of course setting and correcting (respectively), Adebayo entered the league on it. He’s said he’d play his entire career with the team if he could, but he’d fit, fuse, anywhere.

In the wider world, now is not a good time for islands. For the Heat this postseason the tide may have swelled over the breakers for the first time since the Bubble, since Butler, since it seemed like the plan for the next phase of this franchise was set in place.

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Underneath Miami is its own limestone. Miami oolite, Miami Limestone, a unique carbonate rock made of fossilized corals, sea urchins, mollusks and algae. Stretching from Palm Beach to the Everglades, dropping down into the Gulf of Mexico, the ground, formed between 75,000 and 125,000 BP, was pockmarked and gouged porous in the last glacial period when the shallow sea that covered Florida retreated and exposed the delicate ground to air and rain.

That formation also trapped freshwater, and the Biscayne Aquifer, stretching out in the same tract of south Florida, makes it impossible to dig past 15-20ft in the city. Beyond this making it so buildings in Miami are, essentially, delicately stacked over a Pleistocene sponge, the permeability of the aquifer, and its adjacency to the surface, makes it a catchall more than an isolated well. Freshwater is pumped beyond the city, as south as the Florida Keys, and the accelerated lowering of the water tables allows more salt water and man-made contaminates in.

It’s strange to think of a solid formation that predated the presently small, violently singular species moving around on top of it by millions of years feeling its impacts. A layer that would otherwise be buried so far below our aggressive interference now just the distance of 3 basketball backboards stacked together under the surface and vibrating with our overhead development; the rumble of Bugattis and Lamborghinis prowling South Beach, the jet skis ripping over Biscayne Bay.

What’s so impervious to the lurid tides of our own intervention, after all?

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There were injuries, there was Covid, there was life showing the difficult side of itself, but I don’t lay the way the Heat fell out at the feet of its roster. Their efforts, for a group quite literally synonymous with the word contusion for weeks, were Herculean. The Heat have always been willing to pay the bodily price for wins, to their own detriment, still the way they flew through the Hawks, split the Sixers tidily in half, and took Boston, hobbling, within one, does not seem possible on the legs they were on.

What was telling was that in the Eastern Conference Finals, Miami couldn’t take two in a row. The prerequisite of pressure is one thing, but the Heat’s wins were heaving games. A finish line within sight and a sprinter straining, throwing their body forward to get over it first with whatever edge of an inch they can kind of wins. Game 6, in Boston, took everything (47 points from Butler, 18 points from Lowry plus 10 serendipitously timed assists, nine rebounds from Adebayo, Max Strus keeping up with 15 buckets and P.J. Tucker, just everywhere), including the deadpan style the Heat slip on when they know they’ve got a game on the run.

It was always going to take a back-to-back against Boston, so deft by then in the way they could recalibrate game to game. Back in Miami, back in the rarefied embrace of neon with the porous history of hundreds of thousands of years stacked underfoot, the Heat were bone tired and the Celtics clamped on. Even with the same kind of everything, and better, from the game before (Butler 35 points, 9 rebounds; Adebayo 25 and 11; Lowry 15 and seven; Strus eight for each; Victor Oladipo, hungry to be back in this mix, nine points, five rebounds, three assists), with a rare miss on the perfect shot you always want Butler to take, the island finally sank.

What’s lost in Tucker’s leaving, even if Butler shifts to power forward, the Heat are going to feel. Tucker seemed the perfect ballast against bruising weather from bullying bigs, errant muscle, leaving Butler and even Adebayo lighter on their legs, able to careen and pivot and play with the kind of freedom they don’t always allow themselves, bogged down in stoicism. Strus, Caleb Martin, Tyler Herro (sometimes), rare gems unearthed by Miami’s pressure as they were, cannot take the kinds of strides needed to make up for the roster loss and relative front office quiet this summer.

The Heat can stay this way, isolated, and remain the same, but the Heat can’t stay this way and get better. Success sometimes means opening up well past your own safeguards and decades-old barriers, psychic or otherwise, and making for new horizons. Measuring against yourself, strictly, for confidence, components of style, fine, but improvement? I can see Miami wanting to understand what they have going into training camp and the early season. If the team fits together as a more deft, improvisational group, or if it’s going to look like a knock-off of last season, but to get right back here next year — or to even get here, at all — help is going to have to be brought in. There’s no sustainability, not physical or strategic, to staying singular, always, in a league so interconnected. A rising tide lifts all boats but what happens to the land left behind?

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Though we’re all of us migratory we find each other, familiar as archipelagos.

Certain friendships feel like islands, whether two or in clusters, the solidity enough to sustain you. I know this should be cautionary to what’s limiting, or to what can discourage you from stepping outside of self-enforced isolation, but the world was first one island, broken then into pieces, drifting now back together. That we’d mimic, maybe, is ingrained in our cells, our habits cyclical as tides. That and the way islands form, there’s no way to know how big they might get, or how, despite our best intentions, the tenuous geologic bodies that keep them strung together could crumble and sink, washing what all was away. Time, in that way, the biggest island of all. So how sweet to be stranded together, as long as it’ll have us.