Former Miami Heat guard Eddie House, a member of the 2010-11 team that reached the NBA Finals but lost, had something to say on Tuesday in response to some recent comments from former Heat superstar LeBron James.
James made some waves recently by saying the Heat didn’t have “enough complementary guys to actually make it all work” that season.
“I’m takin’ it as he’s talkin’ about me,” House said. “… What I will say is this: If we gonna point the finger, we’ll point the finger at the fourth-quarter collapse every game that we had. Actually, you know what, it was 1-1. Game 2, we were up. We collapsed in the fourth quarter. They tied it up. We win Game 3. We go up 2-1. We didn’t win another game. So, if we’re gonna play the blame game, I wasn’t out on the court. … He (James) was, but he wasn’t.”
James made his controversial comments during an episode of his podcast with former NBA player J.J. Redick.
“My first year in Miami, yeah, we had a Big 3,” James said. “And everyone said it’s a superteam, superteam this, superteam that. But we had to build our team around all minimum guys, which was still okay. But we didn’t fill out the complementary guys enough. Yeah, we had Rio (Mario Chalmers). We had Udonis [Haslem]. But we didn’t have enough as far as — enough complementary guys to actually make it all work. And we still made it to the Finals. We still made it to the Finals, and we still probably should have won the Finals.
“But I still give credit. Listen, it is what it is. You win or you lose, and we lost. It’s no — Dallas was f—— good. And they hit a stride at the right time. Dirk [Nowitzki] was unbelievable. But my second year, we was able to grab some complementary players and role players that really just — I’m talking about superstars in their roles.”
House seemingly doesn’t want the world to forget that James had some brutal fourth quarters during the 2011 NBA Finals. In Game 4 of the series, James scored zero points in the fourth quarter, and in Game 5, he scored two points in the fourth.
Overall during the series, James averaged just 17.8 points per game, an uncharacteristically low number for him.
House, meanwhile, barely saw the floor during the 2011 NBA Finals, appearing in just two games. He did have a solid showing in the final game of the series, scoring nine points all on 3-pointers, but it wasn’t enough to stop the Dallas Mavericks from clinching the title.
The Big 3 era for the Heat eventually resulted in two NBA championships, and both came in the seasons that immediately followed the 2011 NBA Finals letdown. House didn’t get a chance to be part of those championship teams, but he did win a title in 2008 with the Boston Celtics, so he’ll always be able to call himself an NBA champion.
One has to wonder if James’ comments on the 2010-11 Heat rubbed any other members of the team the wrong way. It will also be interesting to see if James responds to House’s comments, though the future Hall of Famer seemingly isn’t the type to engage in public drama very often.
Currently, James is trying to win his fifth NBA title, with the Los Angeles Lakers hoping to make a run in the Western Conference. They’ll have to start by making it out of the play-in tournament after finishing the regular season in eighth place in the West.