While the Boston Celtics and Miami Heat have a long history of intense competition, both teams would prefer to focus on the present.
The Boston Celtics and Miami Heat would like it very much if you forgot about their long and contentious history, if you wouldn’t mind obliging.
Going all the way back to when Celtics team president Danny Ainge was just a player and Heat head honcho Pat Riley coaching against him for the Los Angeles Lakers, their intense rivalry followed Riley to Miami as both became GMs.
Erupting back into prominence in 2013 when LeBron James’ complaints about refereeing was criticized by Ainge, who said it was “almost embarrassing that LeBron would complain about officiating.”
Riley would respond that the Celtics president needed to “STFU and manage his own team” because “he was the biggest whiner going when he was a player.”
“I know that because I coached against him,” he added.
Fast forward to the present, and there’s lots of talk of history, yet a strong push by participants of all sorts to recast the 2020 Eastern Conference Finals as their own beast by persons on both sides.
Celtics head coach Brad Stevens is clearly happy to have players like Marcus Smart, Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum have considerable experience already making deep playoff runs, but also downplays whether that “really matters when you’re trying to win a game,” because “the most important thing is how we play.”
There’s good logic there.
Miami Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra isn’t especially keen to dwell on the past either, despite having two players who played for the Celtics not that long ago in Jae Crowder and Kelly Olynyk.
“Their team is different,” explained Spoelstra on Saturday. “I’m not going t bring them in and ask them what kind of plays they ran for Isaiah Thomas. I don’t know if that is entirely relevant, what kind of misdirection handoffs they were doing for Avery Bradley.”
Despite dust-ups with Marcus Smart while he was with the Chicago Bulls in the first round of the 2017 NBA Playoffs, Jimmy Butler feels similarly. In fact, those dust-ups might be part of the reason for the Marquette product to hope for collective amnesia.
“As far as the Marcus Smart thing goes, he’s a great actor,” said the then-Bulls wing. “Acting tough, it’s what he does. But I don’t think he’s about that. I’m the wrong guy to get in my face. He needs to take it somewhere else, because I’m not the one for that.”
“He’s not about that life,” Butler infamously added.
Turns out, the Flower Mound native is indeed about that life, at least on the court — we’d want to forget about that too if we were him.
Flash forward to the present, and Butler’s tune has changed a bit.
“[Smart is] just another opponent that I get the opportunity to go up against. Nothing to say or make it about me versus him, because that’s not the case. I don’t think he can win it by himself with the Celtics; I can’t win it by myself with the Heat.”
“So, we’re going to focus in on how we can help our team win and not make it a one-on-one, me-versus-him, him-versus-me,” Butler explained.
And as much as it might make for a compelling narrative for the duo to take up the war of words settled in deeds on the parquet, Butler is absolutely correct.
The Celtics aren’t getting past a determined Heat without a team effort, and Miami will need everything they have from their roster as a whole to have a shot at beating Boston in seven games.
These two teams do indeed share a deep and rich history of competition — but if we get too caught up in the past, we won’t see the present unfolding before us in a truly historic moment of its own.
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