The Story with Rachel Nichols: The Heat Aren’t ‘One Piece Away’ (Even With Giannis)

I'm Rachel Nichols, and this is the story.

Do you ever have Looney Tunes clips across your social feed?

If so, you've probably seen at least one of Wile E.

Coyote falling off a cliff, but then he barely grabs some rock on his way down.

He's hanging on by his fingernails.

He stares up, the roadrunner stares down until slowly a pebble or two falls and the coyote slips down the wall and out of the frame.

Yeah , last night in Tampa, the Rays were definitely.

Set up to be the coyote.

In fact, they've been the coyote for much of this World Series, hanging on by their fingernails as their bats generally abandoned them.

Going into last night, the Rays had scored a grand total of 1 run in their previous 17 innings of baseball.

And honestly, it didn't look like much was going to change in Game 4.

The Rays managed a brief 2-1 lead on a Brewers error, but Milwaukee quickly tied it back up and then just nothing.

The game trudged into extras.

Nothing.

The clock rolled past midnight.

Nothing.

It was Milwaukee who finally broke the stalemate in the 12th on a Cooper Pratt home run, and it looked like finally, after 44 years, that city was going to get its World Series win, except this time, the coyote did something unexpected .

It didn't just stare up and start to fade away.

It climbed back up the cliff.

Back over the Roadrunner.

By now you've seen the highlights.

Junior Cabanero reaching on an error, appearing to tweak something, and then legging it out to 3rd anyway on a Liam Hicks single.

Chandler Simpson loading the bases, Ben Williamson bringing it home.

It was the kind of explosion that Rays fans have been waiting for for days, frankly, and then it came in the very last moment it could have.

Well, it made it all the more sweet.

So what happens from here?

Well, Milwaukee still favored, as you may have heard.

It is hard to come back from being 3-1 down in a sports series, but it is not unheard of.

In fact, the Rays are only the 4th team in World Series history with an extra inning comeback to stave off elimination.

The other three went on to win the championship.

We'll see tonight what the Rays can build on all this, but at least for now, the coyote lives, and that is just a stick of dynamite this series needed.

OK, let's talk a little college football because you guys remember back in January when Oregon quarterback Dante Moore went on SportsCenter and he announced he was staying in school for one more season.

He passed on close to $50 million in guaranteed money to chase a national championship, and he said he also just wanted to get better before he went pro.

Now, well, after a concussion, Oregon says he is indeed likely done for the year, and plenty of people online have already decided he just should have taken the money in the first place, except that's a lot easier of a thing to say with the benefit of hindsight and without knowing if something even worse could have happened to him if he had gone pro.

That's the thing about sports.

We love them because they feel like the last great unscripted frontier, the last unknown in a culture where we are now constantly overloaded with information about everything, all of the time.

But they are just that unknown, and frankly, unknowable.

Because think about the other path.

Dante was the consensus #2 quarterback prospect in the draft last year.

And if he had in fact declared, he was all but assured.

To go to the New York Jets.

So yeah, he could have taken the money and gone pro and played behind what is now the 25th ranked offensive line in the NFL and maybe even suffered an injury worse than the one he's sitting with now, or even if he had stayed healthy.

A season or two is the fulcrum of a bad team.

Playing for a historically bad organization can ruin a player from years to come.

Just ask Sam Darnold.

Of course, the path that Moore took, well, that didn't work out either.

You know, last month, At USC, if you don't remember, he scrambled and slid, and that's when the Trojans linebacker Desmond Stevens II hit him anyway.

Dante left on a stretcher, and a month later still hasn't been cleared to play.

Now, fortunately, he is projected to make a full recovery, but scouts are having a hard time placing where he would now go in this next draft if indeed he heads that way.

Mel Kiper, for example, has more 25th on his board with projection to a very different future for him than what was initially assumed.

Still, you can't say it was a bad decision because the road Dante picked has worked out for other people, even if it didn't pay off for him.

In 1997, Peyton Manning was projected to go number one overall, and the team holding that pick was the New York Jets.

Peyton, of course, went back to Tennessee for his senior year instead, went number one to the Colts a year later, and well , he finished with 5 MVPs, 2 Super Bowls, and a spot in the Hall of Fame.

So it worked out OK.

Andrew Luck passed on the draft.

Stay at Stanford.

Then he went #1 to the Colts as well .

Then he made 4 Pro Bowls, and Justin Herbert just did it, yeah, at Oregon, coming back for his senior year, going 6th overall to the Chargers, winning Offensive Rookie of the Year , and then signing a contract that at the time made him the highest paid player in NFL history.

Of course, even then, you just never know.

Herbert's 0 and 6 with the Chargers and Luck, Luck got everything.

Staying in school was supposed to get him.

And he still retired at 29 after years of injuries and rehab took the joy out of the game for him completely.

So the truth is, there's absolutely no way to say whether Dante made the right call or the wrong one.

Not now, not on his draft night, and maybe not even after his first contract.

We'll only know when we can look back at the arc of his whole career.

For now, the coaches at Oregon say they haven't even had a conversation with Moore about what comes next since Dante does still have a year of college eligibility left.

I just hope that he makes to get that call completely healthy because no matter what anyone's saying online right now, this story is a long way from finished.

So let's talk some basketball starting down in Miami where Giannis Antetokopo has yet to win a game in a Heat jersey.

I've been in this position before .

I've lost 5 in a row.

I've lost 7 in a row.

I've won 10 in a row.

I've won 18 in a row.

You just got to keep on playing basketball, you're going to figure it out.

But once you figure it out, you cannot let it go.

Like, feel, feel what you feel now.

I feel what I feel now .

I don't like this feeling.

And the moment, the moment we turn this around, I'm always going to remember this feeling, and I'm going to try not to get back to this feeling.

Look, this is a surprise, even for those who criticize the team's roster heading into the season, they didn't foresee this team getting off to the franchise's worst start in nearly 20 years, or that Miami would rank in the bottom third of the league, both offensively and defensively.

But here's what we did know going in.

This was not a team that was one piece away, not even one giant two-time MVP Greek freak sized winning of a piece.

The Heat finished 10th in the East last season, guys.

The two seasons before that, also 10th and 8th, both times they squeaked into the postseason through the plan and then lost in the 1st round.

What they had before Giannis was not working.

Certainly not after Jimmy Butler left, but really not for a while even before that.

So when they cashed in the store to trade for Giannis over the summer, this was more than just a case of, oh, there's Pat Riley again, star hunting.

It's that the Heat really needed a player of that caliber just to even get into the conversation again.

Of course, the thing is, well, you can't win in the NBA without a truly great player, a truly great player is not enough to win in the NBA.

You need a starting five that really complement each other and make up for each other's weaknesses.

You need a deep bench.

Miami has neither of those things right now.

And that's not only because Tyler Hero, Kh Khalil Whale, and Jaime Jaquez Jr.

are all now in Bucks uniforms.

It's also about the fit of the guys who.

We're still in Miami, starting with Bam Adebayo, who's averaging just 12 points a game after scoring 20 points a game last season.

Bam says it's kind of bad luck.

His shot just isn't falling, but it's, of course, more than that.

The issue that everyone predicted in the offseason is indeed an issue.

Bam and Giannis do some of the same things.

They operate in the same space, and you can see them sometimes getting into each other's way.

Giannis has promised things are going to look better.

Once the two of them aren't so busy, as he put it, trying not to step on each other's toes, and franchise icon Dwyane Wade agreed.

In fact, he said they need to go even deeper than that.

He thinks Giannis and Bam have to have an actual sit down, a heart to heart chat, kind of like the kind he and LeBron had when they played for the Heat.

Back then, the two actually had a verbal conversation.

They agreed that while it was and would always be Wade's team, it was LeBron who'd be more of the alpha on the court.

Now I'm not sure it's that simple with Giannis and Bam, or it's certainly not the same situation.

LeBron and Wade were extremely close friends, so they had a lot of history to fall back on for that kind of conversation, and they were both at the peak of what would turn into Hall of Fame careers.

Most importantly, they also had Chris Bosh, a Hall of Famer in his own right, and a talented supporting other cast that was specifically chosen to maximize them, them being the teams.

Elite players.

This version of the Heat, they don't have anything close to that.

They don't have the shooters they need to stretch the floor.

Their point guard is good, but not elite.

And by the way, it's not like Erik Spoelstra and the Heat front office don't know all of these things, guys.

But getting Giannis did not leave them with enough assets to make up for all those holes, and it will likely be another offseason cycle or maybe even two before they can fill them.

So what can we expect from Miami this season?

I don't think it's going to stay as bad as it is now.

Erik Spoelstra is just too good a coach not to figure something out here.

He's even already acknowledged that the style he had the Heat playing out of the gate, it needs some tweaking, less running, more half court.

But I also don't expect things to get magically fantastically better either.

Getting Giannis was step one for the Heat.

There are a bunch more steps to go, and that should not be a surprise to anyone.

All right, before we go, let's talk about the WNBA Finals where Golden State, just 1 win away from a title.

Now, the big news yesterday was that the W finally figured out where they're gonna play Game 6 at the big arena in Atlanta, which is good, but then in the middle of a weekday, which is less good.

The Valkyries though, don't seem to Mind.

Kia Stokes put it pretty simply.

She said, all we need is two hoops, 94 ft, and each other.

But then again, Angel Reese and the Dream, they got their own plans, and we'll be watching to see just how far this goes.

Because here at Sports Illustrated, the games may end, but the stories don't.

I'm Rachel Nichols.

Thanks for watching.

We'll see you tomorrow.