Kevin Love Turned Up The Heat (Culture) With A Hug Of Gabe Vincent

It was a moment most people wouldn’t have caught, but it positively screamed the two words that have come to define this year’s NBA Finals between the Miami Heat and Denver Nuggets: Heat Culture. Yes, some pundits and T.V. analysts roll their eyes when the two words come up because they think “culture” is a bunch of hooey. But as the Heat’s talismanic on-floor leader, Jimmy Butler, might say via his Twitter account, hooey don’t win you no games.

So, what is this culture of Miami’s that saw them past the highly favored Boston Celtics in the Eastern Conference Finals and now has them tied with Denver at one game apiece in the Big Dance?

Go back to that moment referenced in the first paragraph. With the second quarter of game two winding down and the Heat trailing the Nuggets by nine points, veteran forward Kevin Love passed the ball to his right rather than to his left. The teammate on his right was being closely guarded and missed his shot. The player to Love’s left, Gabe Vincent, the one Love chose not to pass to, was wide open.

On most teams, such a sequence would have resulted in some words exchanged between Vincent and Love or, at best, a frosty glare. What happened instead was that the camera recorded Love walking purposefully over to Vincent and giving him a good hug. Love was acknowledging that he’d made a mistake and was apologizing to his teammate.

Did he need to hug him? Might a simple nod and quiet, “Sorry,” have sufficed? No, Love knew exactly how much Vincent had worked to get himself in a position to take that shot to help his team win. Only a hug, right then and there, would do it justice!

By the end of the third quarter, Denver was up by double digits only to lose the game to a Miami team that shocked the basketball world with its victory. Miami didn’t win game two by having better players than Denver. They won it by focusing their organization for more than a decade on developing the kind of culture that made Love’s hug the most natural, appropriate and effective move on the court. And with apologies to all you HR directors out there, they won because sometimes a hug of accountability is worth a whole inbox of apologetic emails.

Culture is one of those business buzzwords whose meaning can get lost through overuse, but at its core culture refers to a readily observable set of standards, beliefs, values and behaviors that are viewed as acceptable to a team. In the case of the Miami Heat organization, they include:

• The Heat know who they are. They do not look externally for confirmation or validation about deserving to succeed. They look inwardly toward each other for their standards of play.
• The Heat players and coaches are completely accountable to each other for their mistakes and for their achievements, not just one or the other. By owning their mistakes and achievements alike, they add clarity of purpose and expectations. They remove the guessing. They know what teamwork looks like.
• They never, ever overlook an opportunity to polish the chip on their shoulders and cultivate an underdog mindset. Miami doesn’t have to work hard at doing it in a team that includes a small raft of undrafted players as well as two veterans (Love and Kyle Lowry) who are trying to prove they can still play Championship caliber basketball nearly two decades into their careers.
• They hire players and coaches who fit their culture and keep them there to pass the sacred flame down to the next generation. Spoelstra coached Dwayne Wade and LeBron James in the Heat’s great Championship years, and it was Wade who recommended Butler to the Heat.

Do you want to hear different versions of culture talking through the voices of two teams’ coaches? Listen to the coaching adversaries reflecting on the crucial closing minutes of that third quarter, when Denver led 83-75 but would begin to see their lead chipped away. To Denver coach Michael Malone, the moment signified lack of effort.

“This is the NBA Finals,” said an exasperated Malone. “We are talking about effort; that’s a huge concern of mine. We had guys out there that were just — whether feeling sorry for themselves for not making shots or thinking they can just turn it on or off.”

Meanwhile, his counterpart, Spoelstra, was seeing this critical period through a different set of optics.

“Our guys, regardless of how the head coach feels…our guys love to compete,” Spoelstra opined. “They love to put themselves out there in those moments of truth.”

Moments of truth?

Indeed!

We submit that it wasn’t just Spoelstra talking here about moments of truth. That was Heat Culture talking about accountability through adversity through the mouth of its fifteen-year coach. Just as it was Heat Culture talking through the gesture of Love – pun intended – a gesture that left this particular student of the game knowing exactly which culture he’d be willing to put his Championship money on as this contest unfolds.