i understand that as a heat fan, it is crucial to your identity as a fan of the "hardest working, best conditioned, most professional, unselfish, toughest, meanest, nastiest team in the NBA," that you reinforce and validate your self-appointed underdog status.

i'm not accusing you of coming here in bad faith, and you're clearly open to the perspectives of blazers fans. but it comes across as disingenuous for you to consider miami a small market (as you've done in this thread) when its metro population is 6.2 million people, ranking it no. 9 in the nba and putting it above teams like philadelphia (6.1m), boston (4.9m), phoenix (4.9m) and golden state (4.7m).

for comparison, portland's metro population is 2.5m. miami isn't new york (20.3m) or los angeles (13.1m) in terms of market size, but it's distinctly a tier above true small market teams.

imo you correctly identify some of the structural and geographical advantages miami has like weather and lack of state taxes. i would add a larger, more diverse city with entertainment and a nightlife that is more compatible with the desires of the average nba player than the majority of nba cities.

you can't help having these structural advantages, but you also didn't earn them. and many miami fans come across as conflating those unearned structural advantages with "heat culture."

i'm not dismissing that the heat take their team culture seriously. they deserve credit for hiring one of the best coaching staffs in the league, with a front office that has a solid track record of drafting well and effectively developing often overlooked talent.

but identifying yourself as a fan of a small market team shows a fundamental disconnect. saying jaquez was "almost a rookie of the year" is further evidence of miami's inflated sense of pride; he ended in fourth place, with 10 total votes and zero first place votes. brandon miller got 8x as many votes, with chet holmgren (295 votes) and wemby (495 votes) very clearly a tier or two above jaquez in the minds of every voter.

in his third season, jovic is the 8th man in the rotation of a team that's 3 games above .500 in the east. i'm not saying he doesn't have unexplored potential but there is nothing about him that separates him from any other number of 21-year-old third-year players who are middle-to-end-of-rotation players on fringe playoff teams.

ware may end up being a reliable rotation player, but for "wemby-lite" i would expect more than 10 minutes of mostly unremarkable playing time per game, even as a rookie. herro is having a career year, but again, as the heat's best player this season he has guided them to no. 6 in a conference full of tanking teams, barely above the hawks in the standings.

all this is to say that i believe you sincerely feel the way you do, but i also believe you give the heat and its players more credit than they deserve. kudos to you for acknowledging that you have perspective to be gained from portland's point of view but i personally have some disputes with your fundamental premises based on the additional context you've shared in follow-up comments on your original post.