Noah Lyles, an elite track and field sprinter who has won numerous medals and competitions, recently questioned if NBA champions can even be considered world champions.
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The Miami Heat’s Udonis Haslem and Bam Adebayo responded to Lyles’ remark on Instagram and roasted the track and field star for trying to delegitimize NBA champions.
Some may feel that the NBA champions are nothing more than winners of a national pro basketball tournament. However, the best players in the world all play in the NBA, and the league has grown increasingly international over the past 20 years or so.
In addition, not every NBA team is based in the United States. The Toronto Raptors, who won it all in the 2018-19 season, are based in Canada, and commissioner Adam Silver recently acknowledged that the league is considering adding an expansion team in Mexico City in the near future.
This past season, the Heat came close to winning the championship by unexpectedly reaching the NBA Finals. They did so despite finishing with a pedestrian 44-38 regular season record and needing to survive the play-in tournament by the skin of their teeth.
During the regular season, they were the lowest scoring team in the NBA, and they struggled with the 3-point shot, something that had been a big strength for them in the past.
But that all changed once the playoffs began. They powered past the top-seeded Milwaukee Bucks, got past the New York Knicks and survived the Boston Celtics in a classic seven-game Eastern Conference Finals series. There, they blew out Boston on its home court in Game 7 despite having seemingly everything going against them after blowing a 3-0 series lead.
In the championship series, Miami ultimately fell to a much more talented Denver Nuggets team in five games.
The team is currently in a holding pattern as it hopes to trade for Damian Lillard and give itself the offensive firepower it hasn’t had since LeBron James was on its roster. One would think Adebayo would be untouchable in such a hypothetical trade, but one never knows, especially considering the high price recently paid by some other teams, such as the Phoenix Suns, for superstars.
