The modest college careers behind the Miami Heat's improbable NBA Finals run

Several key members of the Heat's rotation came from humble college roots, from Division II to Division III to junior college. In the NBA, they've helped form a group three wins away from a title.

In a meme that circulates regularly on NBA Twitter and other sports-obsessed corners of the internet, NBA commissioner Adam Silver is pictured at a press conference of some sort, with a league-branded microphone in front of him. At the bottom of the picture in big, bold white letters is a quote, attributed to Silver while addressing Kyrie Irving, the mercurial star point guard.

Get ready to learn Chinese, buddy, it reads.

Silver, of course, never actually say this, but the theme of the message is relevant any time a fringe player gets waived or someone like – to borrow a recent example – Dillon Brooks enters free agency on unsteady footing. This league you spent your whole life dreaming of and working toward reaching? You might not be in it that much longer.

It’s a precarious position you’d expect much of the Miami Heat’s roster to be in, clinging to the margins of the NBA. Of the Heat’s 17 players, eight were undrafted. Several others either didn’t play in one of college basketball’s six major conferences or started outside of the Division I ranks entirely.

But instead of being the personification of a meme, Miami is now just three wins from one of the more stunning championships in recent memory.

Though its opponent, the Denver Nuggets, has an uplifting story of its own – making its first Finals appearance in franchise history and doing so with a plodding center who would struggle to jump over a slice of Texas toast – they ultimately have an eight-man rotation featuring five top-30 recruits coming out of high school, three of whom were in the top 10.

Miami, of course, has players of its own whose rise to this level was expected for years. Among its active players, Bam Adebayo and Kevin Love were top-10 recruits who needed only one college season to prove they were ready to be lottery picks. Cody Zeller was a five-star prospect coming out of high school, too, even if he currently looks like a suburban Indianapolis CPA looking to squeeze in a run at the local Y during his lunch break. 

But for much of the Heat’s roster, the path to the NBA was never so clear cut. Hell, it may as well have not even existed at all.

Now, why is a newsletter ostensibly about college sports talking about the NBA? Because the improbability of this Miami team is inseparable from what (and where) these players were in college.

The stories of these five players reflect that.

Jimmy Butler

We’ll get the most famous example out of the way early.

By this point, Butler’s story and background are well known, largely because it’s equal parts tragic and uplifting. His father abandoned the family when he was a baby and when Butler was 13, his mother, frustrated with his missteps, kicked him out of the house. 

He found solace in basketball, but it didn’t appear as though major college basketball, let alone the NBA, would be a viable option. As a junior at Tomball High School outside of Houston, he averaged just 10 points per game as a junior. That average shot up to 19.9 as a senior, along with 8.7 rebounds per game, but college interest didn’t follow.

With limited options, he ended up at Tyler Junior College in east Texas, but even there, he still had to try out for the team. He quickly proved to be the team’s best player, averaging 18.1 points, 7.7 rebounds and 3.1 assists per game. His production caught the eye of newly promoted Marquette head coach Buzz Williams, a Texas native, who made Butler his first recruit with the Golden Eagles.

After averaging just 5.6 points in 19.6 minutes per game off the bench in 2008-09, he earned all-Big East recognition in each of his final two seasons. And the rest, as they say, is history.

"It's taught me that anything is possible," Butler said to ESPN in 2011 of his journey. "My whole life, people have doubted me. My mom did. People told me in high school I'm too short and not fast enough to play basketball. They didn't know my story. Because if they did, they'd know that anything is possible.”

Gabe Vincent

It reads like a riddle, but unbelievable as it may seem, it’s true: the guard who scored 42 points on 57.7% shooting across the first two games of the Finals was the fourth-leading scorer on the 2017-18 UC Santa Barbara Gauchos.