Former NBA star Antoine Walker believes the Miami Heat would have definitely beaten the Golden State Warriors if they had replaced the Boston Celtics.
Antoine Walker considers himself an alumni of the NBA, having started his career with the Boston Celtics in 1996 and winning the NBA Championship with the Miami Heat in 2006.
As someone who has spent 12 years in the league between five different teams, Walker can watch his former teams from a relative distance. With that distance, the focus was on a controversial perspective: The Heat could have played better than the Celtics in the Finals, leading to the Warriors’ downfall.
“I hate to come out of the Golden State, but if you go back and see the movie, Boston gave the Golden State that championship,” Walker said on the Locked On Heat podcast.
Although Walker flirts with a former team on a podcast supporting another former team, this has nothing to do with what Golden State accomplished and more than what the Celtics couldn’t. Walker isn’t alone in his analysis: Many noted Boston losing momentum throughout the finals as they fell by the wayside to the victorious Golden State team.
It’s not unreasonable to imagine that if Heat had more depth, they’d at least be able to make it through a series finals. But it doesn’t bother you to see a Celtic family member make that observation – even if Walker has been removed twice.
Antoine Walker believed that unlike the Celtics, the Heat could have beaten the Warriors
The biggest counterargument to Walker’s statement is that effectively, the Heat had the same opportunity as the Celtics to play the Warriors, yet Miami were defeated by Boston in the Eastern Conference Finals.
It came to a tight 3-3 series, but in the end, Boston came out victorious in a 100-96 win in Game 7.
To Walker’s credit, it was frustrating to watch the Heat regress in the post-season after Jimmy Butler’s landmark campaign. At times, Butler was the driving force for the entire team, eventually leading to their exit in the playoff. Fellow Heat players such as Pam Adebayo, Tyler Hero and Kyle Lowry have been praised for their talents, but they to fail in postseason. It’s hard not to wonder what the Heat-Warriors Finals series would have looked like if everyone in Miami played to their full potential.
Of course, the same could be said of the Celtics, who won Game 1 and Game 3 before the Warriors escaped with a seven-game series. Imagining anyone but the Warriors as champions remains wishful thinking, but perhaps it could lead the Celtics and the Heat to reconsider their roster in October.
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