NBA Finals 2012: Miami Heat Take Advantage of Balanced Roster to Win NBA Finals

The Miami Heat won the NBA championship Thursday night after defeating the Oklahoma City Thunder 121-106 and winning the series, 4-1.

LeBron James and Chris Bosh finally got a chance to experience winning the big one. Dwyane Wade already won his first ring in 2006 so his resume falls into a slightly different path.

Nonetheless, the Heat (as a team) got a chance to celebrate the feeling of winning while the Thunder got some experience under their belt as sometimes it takes losing to realize what needs to be done in order to win.

The Miami Heat can probably understand the feeling as they were in a similar situation last year after losing the NBA Finals to the Dallas Mavericks in six games.

The Heat, led by their trio of James, Wade and Bosh, were able to use their experiences of playing together and losing in last year’s NBA Finals to their advantage against a young Thunder team making their first appearance on the big stage.

Furthermore, having a balanced scoring attack on any team gives that team an advantage.

Getting big plays out of the likes of Mario Chalmers, Shane Battier and Udonis Haslem (all three throughout the series), and Mike Miller (in Game 5)—such as making shots and/or grabbing key rebounds down the stretch when needed—helped the Heat tremendously as it put even more pressure on the young Thunder to score to keep the game in hand.

The bottom line is that having this sort of balance on the roster really helped the Heat push past the Thunder and cannot go unseen.

At the end of the day James, Wade and Bosh may be the ones getting most of the publicity in Miami, but they probably know that they might not have been in this position if it were not for their teammates who came up big when it mattered.