Udonis Haslem Used Draymond Green's Comment as Motivation to Single-Handedly Save the Heat's Season

The Miami Heat avoided elimination on Friday night with a 111-103 win over the Boston Celtics. The Game 6 victory sends the series back to Miami for a winner take all Game 7 with a trip to the NBA Finals on the line. A Heat victory would be the attestation of Heat Culture and even more importantly, proof that the NBA's secret code is infallible.

Before this 2022 postseason it seemed like unwritten rules were more of a baseball thing, but we've now had two instances of code-breaking this spring. First when Steve Kerr said that Dillon Brooks "broke the code" on the play that injured Gary Payton II.

Hey, that makes perfect sense. You shouldn't do something that puts someone in a position where they could really get hurt and that's exactly what Brooks did. It's something you'd expect from the pros all the way down to kids running around on the playground at recess. So what else has risen to the severity and seriousness of an accussation of code-breaking?

Saying who you think will win a series.

Immediately following the game last night Udonis Haslem, fresh off a zero point, zero rebound, zero minute performance, ran over to the ESPN broadcast crew to have them tell Draymond Green, "thank you for the inspiration."

Yahoo!'s Chris Haynes was able to catch up with Haslem backstage and get some more quotes that were equally silly. Via Yahoo!:

“Draymond broke the code,” Haslem told Yahoo Sports after the Heat’s 111-103 victory. “You ain’t supposed to say some s*** like that. That’s disrespectful. He know better than that.”

That disrespectful shit? When asked repeatedly who the Wariors wanted to play in the next round, Draymond Green told the TNT guys that the Warriors were going to play the Celtics in the Finals.

“He let Shaq peer pressure him into saying some s*** he ain’t got no business saying,” Haslem told Yahoo Sports. “I didn’t sleep much after he said that. That was some bulls***.”

There is just so much to unpack there. First of all, the Heat haven't even won the series yet. No, wait. First of all is that Udonis Haslem couldn't sleep because of this. Like Draymond predicting the outcome of a series presented Haslem with some deep philosophical quandary that he spent the night wrestling with.

Haslem wasn't the only one taken aback by Greens comments... sorry, Green's comment. Singular. (If you can call it a comment.) One other member of the Heat was willing to go on the record about the broken code. Via Yahoo!.

“I don’t know what part of the game is that,” Heat forward P.J. Tucker told Yahoo Sports of Green’s comment. “A player picking a team before they’re out. That’s crazy, bro.”

This and the baseball players fighting over fantasy football has made one thing abundantly clear: no amount of money, stature, or success can hide the fact that some people are huge dorks.

The things that athletes have to pass off as motivation are so fascinating. Fascinating in that it's interesting how lame most of them are. Did the Heat really not want to win this series until Draymond Green, a player not involved in this series, said they were going to lose?

Did anyone ask Jimmy Butler about this? Do you think he would dignify it with a response? Is he worried the last man on the bench didn't get a good night's sleep because of the offensive thing Draymond Green said? Is anyone embarassed about this? That's the most important question.

Is anyone embarassed that the guy who has played fewer minutes in this series than Luke Kornet is upset about what Draymond said? This man played 83 minutes total this season and hasn't entered a game since April 10th, during the Heat's regular season finale. Is the 15th man for any other team giving quotes about anything this deep in the postseason? When was the last time we heard from Golden State's Chris Chiozza? Is there anything sadder or funnier than running over to say I told you so to Mike Breen and Jeff Van Gundy after you notched your 17th consecutive DNP-CD?

And the Heat haven't even won the series yet! They really better win Game 7 after Haslem made this big a deal about The Code. You can't talk like this unless someone else's play can back it up.