Miami Heat: Will There Be Any Drama to Their Upcoming Championship Run?

Spoiler alert...

The Miami Heat are going to win the NBA championship next June.

OK, so that wasn't really a spoiler, but worth saying since there are bound to be a few people reading this who, without a trace of irony, are speculating on a different outcome to the upcoming season.

If you like the Thunder or the Bulls or some other upper-echelon team, you may find yourself entertaining the thought of them holding up the Larry O'Brien Trophy. What you don't realize is you're subconsciously thinking back to the days when the top three or four teams in the power rankings had similar championship odds.

In the NBA of today and tomorrow, you see, championships will not be vied for so much as arranged. Cosmic egos no longer have the tolerance for trial and error; the new path to success is at the contract table, where power moves are now made to preemptively negate the odds of losing.

Of course, the leaders and most adept followers of this paradigm are the Heat, which is why the inflated swagger is back with a vengeance. They are aware that it took a pair of unlikely freak occurrences to stop them the last time around; lightning struck twice last June—what are the odds of it striking four times?

Since the Heat's first Finals together was such an aberration, it can scarcely be used to predict their chances going forward. Anybody remotely paying attention will tell you the Heat are still a no-brainer to take home the upcoming Finals—along with many, many more. We're not just talking contenders, we're talking championship lock.

LeBron James is no doubt taking a page out of Jason Terry's book and getting an early championship tattoo of his own—in all likelihood a pair of lips in an area that can't be shown on camera. No doubt, Chris Bosh has his vocal cords already primed to do some big, mean yelling once the final buzzer sounds on 2011-12.

Once we admit the Heat will be heavy favorites in every single solitary game they play from now until they disband, it takes a pretty big stretch of the imagination to see anyone nudging them off their one-way track to the promised land.

With their top-heavy roster, it's barely even fair—which are the only odds James will play—and yet they're bound to take a few losses because hey, we all miss the bowl once in a while, am I right, fellas?

So let's say the Heat end the season with a relatively conservative 60 wins and six upsets, and become the first team ever to finish at .900—will anybody really be impressed? Will there have been any drama at all in their 66 games of buffing the hardwood with the "competition?"

Man, remember back in the days when we didn't actually know who was going to win the championship? Back when having a favorite still meant someone else had a fighting chance? Back when, if that favorite somehow lost, it wasn't the greatest failure ever witnessed?

Some of our younger readers, raised on entitlement-age NBA ball, might say they don't care for the uncertainty.

How the times have changed; uncertainty used to be the reason we tuned in. Now, we tune in to watch a foregone conclusion play itself out, with the only real attraction being, a) highlight-riddled basketball, and, b) the possibility of some inexplicable breakdown in the Big Black Machine.

I remember when we didn't actually know whether the late-'90s Bulls were capable of winning another title, and the sense of accomplishment you got when they went out and did it. They went out and played in the shadow of possible failure, which gave people exciting and unpredictable basketball.

But that was then, I suppose. We now watch basketball for the same reason we watch action flicks: We can see the ending coming a mile away, but we're in it for the pretty pyrotechnics. And if there's one thing Miami does best, it's looking pretty out on the floor.

Is this a bad thing? That mostly depends on who you ask. Depending on their priorities, non-partisan basketball fans may or may not be turned off by the severely skewed playing field, but fans in the other 28 NBA cities can't be too happy about their teams playing essentially the same role as that goat they fed to the T-Rex in Jurassic Park.

If you used to watch because you were interested in the final outcome, I regret to inform you that NBA is pretty much a memory. Sure, there's still the Western Conference playoffs where you can watch a field of possible contenders fight to make the Finals, but be advised, they're simply contending for the honor of losing to the Heat.

Overall, the NBA will—assuming they can at least neutralize the stink of their recent mega-missteps—be a relative success, much of that due to the world's morbid curiosity about the Heat. People will cite TV revenue increases and jersey sales as a sign that the game is in fantastic shape.

The only price for this success will be the removal of doubt and drama from the process of winning championships. When Miami closes out the Finals next June, that romantic sense of accomplishment and overcoming we recall will ostensibly be replaced with a mundane, almost anticlimactic feeling of inevitability.

Watching in the hopes of seeing Miami lose (somehow) is an exercise in frustration, and could very well increase the nation's rate of stress-related heart disease. All one can do is hope some team can overachieve and make it interesting as we watch the Heat's carefully orchestrated destiny unfold.

LeBron will have the ring we've all brainwashed him into thinking he needs to be considered great, Pat Riley will have more cliffnotes for his success seminars, and the city of Miami will once again revel in its status as the prettiest girl at the dance.

And everybody will have seen it coming. The only question is whether the Heat's story will have any compelling set pieces along the way. Will they just eat the NBA alive all year before going 16-1 in the postseason? That is the most likely scenario at the moment...

Professionalism and preparation dictate that other "contending" teams not treat their struggles for success as totally moot in the grand scheme of things, but the average onlooker nowadays would say they are. The Heat will tolerate no less.

We will all continue to "ooh" and "ah" at their athletic supremacy on a play-by-play basis, but the end-of-game results will make no one bat an eyelash because sheer, crushing dominance is par for the course. While there are still many things to enjoy about watching these guys play, drama is no longer one of them.