There will be no relaxation on the Miami Heat’s watch, apparently.
Dion Waiters and James Johnson, two newcomers to the team this past season, were in the best shape of their lives. They, in turn, became billboards for the Heat’s commitment to player conditioning, which, it seems, is psychopathic in nature, but kind of in a good way.
I think.
Here’s Alex Kennedy of HoopsHype with some anecdotes:
Every Monday, players are weighed and their body fat percentage is measured. Each player has specific goals that are customized for them, but the team goal is for everyone to fall under 10 percent body fat. What happens if a player doesn’t meet his goal? When asked, one Heat player laughed and said he didn’t know because every player on the roster met their goals – mainly because they were too scared to find out the consequences.
Miami has a rule that players can’t put their hands on their knees for a breather during a practice or game. Any player who does this is fined $100, according to a league source who’s close with several former Heat players. If that’s a rule, you can imagine what the penalty would be for showing up overweight…
“This culture is real,” Johnson said. “We have the kind of practices where you can’t go out and hang out all night and think you’re going to be able to come to practice and really go hard because I’ll call you out, everybody on this team will call you out. We won’t leave it to the coaches to call you out. We take care of that ourselves.”
This is amazing, and weird, and awesome, and everything and anything else it could possibly be. A $100 find for showing fatigue? In practice? Right on.
You have to wonder, though, whether this also acts a free-agency deterrent. Kennedy goes on to say it does. Not every player wants to work this hard during the 82-game grind that is the regular season—especially now, when the research on the value of rest and relaxation is extensive and tilted in the favor of less being more. You could easily imagine the Heat’s devotion to body-sculpting preventing some high-end free agents from signing with them.
On the flip side, this acts as a natural weeding-out process. The Heat clearly don’t want guys who aren’t prepared to put in the work. If they sign someone, they know he’s ready to bust his tail during the regular season and over the summer—particularly now, when their methods behind the scenes are quickly becoming public knowledge. Someone would have to be a fool to sign with them and not have some idea what they’re in for.
We’ll see whether this plays a factor in this summer’s free agency, or whether the Heat simply opt to stand relatively pat, re-investing in a feel-good core that posted the NBA’s second-best record during the latter half of the season. For now, we get to bask in anecdotes and descriptions like these, which, even now, remain super interesting.
