THE MORNING OF June 21, 2012, the front cover of The Miami Herald carried the headline, "REIGN BEGINS." There was LeBron James raising the Larry O'Brien trophy for the first time, and across the league it was a no-brainer: If you can't beat those guys, you can't win. A string of Heat titles -- "not five, not six ..." -- seemed, for the moment, likely.
History, though, screams a different story. Predicting dynasties is a lousy business. In the 3-point era, which began in 1980, there have been just eight back-to-back champions, and of those, only three repeated a third time. Which means that of the past 37 postseasons, only 11 champs have repeated.
Dominant though a team might appear, events tend to conspire against trophies in bunches. The Heat dynasty resulted in a worthy haul of two titles. Rare and impressive -- but hardly making it "reign" -- and, like so often happens, it was all undone by something nobody saw coming. Just two years after the Herald headline, on July 11, 2014, James' smiling face was on the front cover of Sports Illustrated with the headline, "I'M COMING HOME." To Cleveland.
And just like that, the reign was over. Two of the Heat's big three were out of Heat uniforms (LeBron as a Cav, Chris Bosh in street clothes) just four years later. Who knows when Miami will win another title?
All of which leads us to the Warriors, who -- though younger than those Heat -- came within a minute of being the 73-win back-to-back champions. If ever there were a dynasty to project, this would have been it. But of course, as history would predict, things didn't go that way because they usually don't.
JUST TWO YEARS ago, Shane Battier started playoff games for the two-time defending champs, but he watched the 2016 NBA Finals from the golf sanctuary of Pinehurst, North Carolina.
He's retired now, talking by phone after playing 54 holes of golf in 36 hours. He says various things undid the Heat. Gregg Popovich perfected a whirling San Antonio Spurs offense (that inspired today's Warriors) that was so destructive and emotionally taxing that it effectively sent key members of the team like Battier, Ray Allen and Rashard Lewis straight into retirement.
But then there's the matter of all that work.
The Heat were crawling into the Finals. Wade had missed 28 games in the 2013-14 regular season due to "maintenance" and general knee soreness, telling ESPN the Magazine for the Body issue: "From 2012 to 2014, those years were so hard for me. I felt like my body was betraying me." James' run of six straight Finals has been well-chronicled, but few point out that he also participated in the 2012 Olympics while Wade and Bosh stayed home.
Battier points to both mental and physical exhaustion as reasons why the Heat couldn't three-peat, which is an important backdrop to Curry bowing out of the 2016 Olympics to rest and rehab his knee.
"First of all, the toll that two Finals trips take on you is significant," Battier says. "For us, we had an older team and so we had to be really careful about how we managed the third year."
Battier knows what he would say to Draymond Green, who was sensational in Game 7, tallying 32 points, 15 rebounds, 9 assists and 2 steals. He became just the second player in NBA Finals history to make six 3-pointers in a Game 7. The other: you guessed it, Battier himself.
But Battier warns that Green's individual success -- Game 7 aside -- must remain embedded in the team context.
"[Green is] the key to that team," Battier says. "Pat Riley used to tell us about the Disease Of More. When you win, you want more. You want more respect, you want more shots, you want more shine. And you started to see that a bit this year with Draymond."
Battier points to the halftime, profanity-laced argument in late February where ESPN's Lisa Salters reported that Green shouted, "I am not a robot. I know I can play." Green had shot 0-for-5 in the game after shooting fewer 3-pointers under Kerr compared to Luke Walton's interim stretch.
"To me, he was saying, 'I want more,'" Battier says. "If I could talk to those guys, I would say that's the pitfall to creating a dynasty. It's keeping the guys that are the essential glue pieces, and keeping them to glue pieces and not make them more than that."
On Sunday night after losing Game 7, Green told The Undefeated that he'd accept the Team USA invitation to participate in the Olympics in Rio this summer. Few things represent an individual's coronation as a superstar quite like being asked to play for Team USA. After playing 413 more minutes than he has ever played in his career and leading all players in postseason minutes, Green wants more. Curry is taking a break to rest and rehabilitate his knee.
Perhaps Curry understands that the challenge of staying at the top is not a matter of doing more. It's a matter of doing less.
TO BE SURE, this Warriors team is not that Miami Heat team. Even though they were younger -- the 2012-13 Heat were the league's second-oldest team, with an average age of 30.3 years, while the Warriors squad averages 27.4 years -- the Warriors dealt with more injuries.
Chasing the 73-9 win record and trying to rehab Curry's knee on the fly was an uphill climb, and the wear-and-tear began to build. The 32-year-old Andre Iguodala spent time in the locker room during games dealing with a balky back and had to be pulled from the starting lineup for the epic Game 7. Andrew Bogut, trying to fill the void created by a suspended Green, suffered a bone bruise in his knee after an awkward collision with J.R. Smith in Game 5. The starting center missed Games 6 and 7, and his fill-ins struggled mightily.
What the Warriors were trying to do -- win with a title with its best player missing more than two games due to injury (Curry missed six games) -- has never been done in the 3-point era. In fact, of the past 36 years, only two champions have had a key player (minimum 25 minutes per game) who lost more than two games due to injury: the 1996 Bulls with Toni Kukoc missing three games in Round 2 and the 2012 Heat with Bosh missing nine games.
But neither Kukoc or Bosh was the reigning MVP.
The Warriors' unraveling looked a lot like the Heat's demise. Battier and the Heat tied the 2014 Finals at 1-1 with homecourt in their favor. But then the Spurs won the next three games by 19, then 21, then 17. Pat Riley told ESPN.com they were three of the greatest games ever played.
These Warriors? With two of the remaining three games at home and needing just one victory, the Warriors lost by an average of 11 points each game. And the label of "greatest team ever" was wiped away by a LeBron James block, a Kyrie Irving 3-pointer and the accumulated toll of stresses.
That's no surprise. And yet, almost four years to the day after the Miami Herald's "REIGN BEGINS" headline, another one ran at the Cleveland Plain Dealer on Monday morning: "WELCOME REIGN."
