Miami Heat Outlook

Question: Miami Heat is +180 to win it all this year, takeback -260. Their season wins total is 62.5. Any opinions?

Wait on the 62.5. There are a ton of developments yet to occur over the next couple of months that will affect this wager.

My first reaction on the title is +180 to win it all is a real sucker bet. You've still got 4 very competent teams in the Lakers, Magic, Celtics, and Hawks capable of beating Miami. Miami will probably have to beat 2 of them to win it all.

At -260 or -240, the smarter money would be on fading the Heat imo.

But if they get a cream-puff early season schedule, you may get -150 fading them to win the title around Xmas.

I don't think it's beyond David Stern (by far the most dominant player in the league) and the NBA marketing machine to do everything possible to max this NBA/Miami Heat media-money circus by giving them lots of home games and/or bottom-feeders in November and December (remember, 16 of the first 20 Lakers games last year were home games) to get them out to a 25-2 start, and really get the hype going.

But after saying that, I'll say this: Miami has a lot of work to do, and they've got some big holes in their lineup as of the day of this writing.

The big three ($50+ mil this year) definitely make them formidable, there's no debating that. But they still need 10 more guys to make a team (NBA teams are required to have 13 players under contract).
Back-up shooting guard Mike Miller gets paid $4.6 mil this year, so he's happy.
But now you've got about $5 mil total this year left for everyone else, which includes 3 second round rookies, and about $1.2 million each (+-league min for a vet) for the vets.
All this could- no, make that probably will leave the Heat's 2nd team vulnerable to the second units of teams around the league.
It may be hard to get a decent role playing vet to give up several million bucks late in his career cause he's gonna really need that money down the road. For all practical purposes, you're asking an established NBA vet to play for free, by NBA standards. This is no joking matter, and something these guys will be taking very seriously making their off-season decisions as they figure out how they are going to take care of their families for the next 35 years.

The combination of good role players and good chemistry needed to win an NBA title will be much more than an automatic for this team. They won't be on Glory Road to a 70 or even 65 win season with minimum wage, maximum age vets.

Boston's bench single-handedly won them 2 games in the finals vs. the Lakers, and if the Celtics had one more home game, their bench may have given them the title. Forget Kobe Bryant, the Finals MVP for the Lakers should have been the pilot who flew them out of Logan International airport in Boston back to L.A. after game 5.

When you get past the hype and down to the nuts and bolts & chemistry that will be tested over 100 regular season and play-off games, Miami winning it all is very far from a given in my book. That's my 2 cents.