Shane Battier acknowledged what most of us already knew, the Miami Heat have major flaws in their roster. Battier did his best to be honest when reflecting upon losing to the San Antonio Spurs in Game 5 of the NBA Finals on Sunday.
Battier, who played in his last game, told Bleacher Report’s Ethan Skolnick that the Heat were exposed.
“Unfortunately, I made the mistake of looking at our defensive rank before the Finals,” Battier said. “And I know that no team outside the top 10 had ever won the title. So we’d have to do something pretty historic to beat the best offensive team in the league. And that 12th ranking is not the result of two weeks or a month of basketball. It’s the result of an entire season. And we just didn’t have the fundamentals to stop an offensive juggernaut like the Spurs. And we were exposed.”
Battier was candid in admitting that it was a difficult season that seemed like more pressure than fun for everyone involved.
“It was a difficult year,” Shane Battier said after his final NBA game, repeating a sentiment he’d privately expressed several times during the season. “It was a trying year from the standpoint that there were very few pure moments. That was the biggest difference between the past two years.
“And we were always trying to conjure something. And for a while there, in the second half, it worked. But you can’t win a championship trying to conjure something. It has to be who you are, and it has to be pure, and that wasn’t the case for us this year.”
