The Los Angeles Lakers Are Cruising While the Miami Heat Are Losing

The NBA season is less than two months old and already some strange and unpredictable things have happened.

The Atlanta Hawks are 14-12, Richard Jefferson is fifth in scoring, the Portland Trailblazers have the NBA's longest winning streak of the season, and the first coach to get the axe was not Isaiah Thomas.

One thing that may come as a surprise to some but not to others is the Miami Heat's record of 8-20. The same team that was celebrating the franchise's first NBA championship just 18 months ago is now 12 games under .500 in the Eastern Conference.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Lakers are 18-10 and have posted impressive wins over the Suns (twice), Nuggets (twice), Spurs, Pistons, Jazz, and Rockets. The Lakers have as many wins over those six playoff teams as the Heat have against the entire NBA.

The Heat and the Lakers will be tied together as long as both Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal are active. Since Miami has won their championship, it has been easy to declare the Heat the winners of the trade.

Miami made the trade because they had a goal of winning an NBA title—and they accomplished that goal. But with each day that passes and each game that Shaq gets paid a quarter of a million dollars to put up 13 points and eight rebounds, the trade looks more and more lopsided in the Lakers favor.

For starters, the Heat team that won the title in 2005-6 was 50-32. They won one regular-season game against the NBA's other division winners that year. And yet, they chose to keep the same group of players together going into the 2006-7 season.

To call their championship lucky would be a gross understatement. They benefitted from playing a tired Pistons team in the Eastern Conference Finals, and were given a generous officiating crew in the Finals against Dallas—D-Wade shot 96 free throws in six games.

You can't blame the Heat for either of those things, since they had no control over them. What you can blame Pat Riley for is thinking that the same group of players, albeit one year older, would be able to compete for another title.

You can blame him even more for thinking that Smush Parker, Ricky Davis and Mark Blount would be enough to make them contenders again this year.

It may sound like I'm contradicting myself because I criticize them for not making changes after 2006 and then blast them for actually making changes after 2007. The difference is that they let guys go instead of either trading them, and had no back-up plan in place if those guys left.

Forbes Magazine recently released a report on the world's wealthiest sports owners. Heat owner Micky Arison was listed third in the world, but first in the United States. He's wealthier than Mark Cuban, Daniel Snyder, and even Paul Allen.

Which makes it all the more puzzling that Arison was willing to let Jason Kapono, Eddie Jones, and James Posey walk away from the Heat because he was scared to pay the luxury tax—yet he wasn't afraid of giving Shaq a five-year, $100 million extension that still has two-and-a-half years left on it.

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