In the five games of this series before tonight’s game, Andre Iguodala (or, as I have taken to calling him, Andretirementhome IguOLDala) had scored a combined total of eight points on 3-of-13 shooting. His scoring output in the series against Indiana and Milwaukee was marginally higher, but this game still represents the first double-digit scoring game for him in the postseason. Not only that, but this is his best game in a Heat uniform, at least from a pure pointage perspective. Even for a player who is mostly out there for his defense, that level of scoring rather bad, especially when you take into account the reputation as a good-but-not-great scorer that Iguodala has deservedly earned over the past decade-plus.
That’s funny because Andre Iguodala was the player who the Heat were SPECIFICALLY TARGETING when that mondo trade went down between Memphis, Miami, and Minnesota. Players were getting sprayed all over the place, including some pretty decent ones (I love you Gorgui Dieng), but the whole point of it was so that Pat Riley could acquire the “coveted” “services” of Old Man Iggy. The real success story of that trade was Jae Crowder, but I’m not letting the Heat off the hook here. They didn’t care about Crowder. Crowder was a throw-in. What they really wanted was Andre “Least Deserving Finals MVP in Recorded History” Iguodala, and they were willing to cut ties with both James Johnson and Justise Winslow (Dion Waiters was also dumped on the Grizzlies without ceremony, so I guess that was the secondary success story) in order to achieve that aim.
That trade also netted them Solomon Hill. So they basically got three of the same player, just with different hairstyles (luscious dreads vs. hobo afro vs. drastically receding hairline).
Thanks in part to Iggy’s surprisingly hot shooting, the Heat are now on their way to the Finals. As a Bucks fan, this makes me feel slightly better: losing to a Finals-bound team is the only acceptable way to lose in the playoffs. I’m still suffering from elevated salt levels (could you tell?) but if the Heat actually take home that shiny Larry O’Brien, I might find it in my heart to be happy for them.
P.S. I will never be happy for Iguodala if he wins a championship because his selfish actions directly led to the demise of a promising Nuggets team. There was a championship contender waiting to emerge out of the mountains of Colorado and Iguodala single-handedly destroyed it.
P.P.S. I will extra super-duper never EVER be happy for Iguodala for ANY reason EVER because he whined like a whiny whiner when he got traded to the Grizzlies. Then it turned out the Grizzlies were pretty good and he still didn’t want to play for them. He declined the opportunity to play with dynamic ROTY of the year Ja Morant so he could sit around and collect checks for not doing anything and wait for a trade. It’s obvious now that he sat out so that he wouldn’t tank his trade value, because if he had played the whole season everybody would have seen how much his scoring fell off a cliff and no contender would ever bother trying to “rescue” him from Memphis and take on his bloated bloatsicle of a contract.
P.P.P.S. Did you know that the seventeen million dollars Iguodala is getting paid this season is the most money he’s ever been paid in a single season? A 36-year-old who scored in double-digits four times is earning a career-high salary. Whichever moron in the Warriors front office who thought that contract was a good idea should be traded to the Heat so he can be thrown in the accounting dungeon and sentenced to fifty years of unpaid salary-cap number-crunching without a calculator or adequate food.