“Let’s be honest, guys, we’re not sitting here and saying this is not something special. This is an unbelievable streak that we’re on. We’re playing great basketball. We win in different phases of the game. We’re playing different styles. We’ve won every game, on the road, at home. Double overtime games. End-of-regulation games. Whatever the case may be, we’ve been able to pull games out. So I’m not going to sit here and say that it’s not special what we’re doing.”
LeBron James
The NBA boasts its form of March Madness as the Miami Heat look to extend their 27 game winning streak by winning their next three road games, and their basketball confidence grows with each victory. The overall record holder of the most consecutive wins in a regular season belongs to the 1970-1971 Los Angeles Lakers with 33 wins. As the pressure builds the Heat must maintain their overall basketball mental toughness and continue to focus on their play during the four quarters of each game, and not the record books.
The Heat’s journey along this streak proved to be full of emotional highs and lows, poor shooting at times, double deficit comebacks, and most recently an injury to their star guard Dwyane Wade. While he is expected to return in the next couple of days, the Heat showed tremendous basketball confidence in their bench as the team continues to explode in the fourth quarter.
The mental game of basketball pushes successful players to diminish outside distractors, but with a win streak these distractors grow exponentially with the expectations of fans and media. A great basketball mind understands these pressures and devotes energy to creating a calm mindset. Miami Heat coach Erik Spoelstra plans to promote this idea of preserving a strong mental focus on the present, with no emphasis on the win streak. He said, ”It’s an opportunity just to treat it as a business trip. That’s what we talked about. This is a business trip. It’s not about the story line. It’s not about anything else.”
The Heat’s journey with destiny leads through tough road games in Chicago, New Orleans, and San Antonio. Basketball psychology promotes the use of short term goals for each individual game, or even each individual quarter to prevent player’s mindset from the worry of future games or the record. In fact, the coaches and players of the Heat remain rather tight lipped when pressed for comments. Controlling the thoughts and conversation on positive aspects of the present game allows for more effective mental preparation.
The Miami Heat must exhibit a consistent mental toughness and focus over the next two weeks to reach an opportunity to surpass a 42 year old record. An accomplishment this special requires superb basketball confidence and contribution from all players and coaches on the entire team. Many sports fans cheer for the Heat, and hope to watch history made with a broken record. Should Miami continue to win, the record breaking game occurs on April 9th at home against the Milwaukee Bucks.
