The Heat Is Dissipating Quickly

Which one of you is Batman again?

If the Heat players were “absolutely disgusted” with themselves after Game 1, as Coach Pat Riley said, what must they think of themselves after Sunday night’s Game 2 pratfall?

“We’re not worthy?”

“We’re beneath contempt?”

“We’re going to Disneyland?”

Shaquille O’Neal is missing. If you find him, please return him to AmericanAirlines Arena in Miami before Game 3. He was last seen Sunday night, somewhere inside the Mavericks’ defense.

Then there’s Dwyane Wade, who’s supposed to be Robin to O’Neal’s Batman, or Batman to O’Neal’s Robin. Sunday it was more like Wade was Abbott to O’Neal’s Costello.

At least O’Neal is 34 and surrounded by Mavericks. Wade is 24 and plays guard but he stunk out the place anyway, scoring 12 of his 23 points in the extended garbage time after the Mavericks took a 27-point lead in the third period.

Wade missed 13 of his 19 shots, turned the ball over four times and got one technical foul.

Meanwhile, O’Neal was outscored, six to five, by Erick Dampier, whom he once called “Erica.”

O’Neal now has three sub-20-point games in the 26 he has played in the Finals -- two of those in this series. His previous low had been 14 as a Laker in the 2004 humiliation by Detroit.

Of course, if Heat players thought that was bad, they still had to ride home on an airplane with Riley, who turned the 1985 Finals around with two days of rage after the Celtics’ 148-114 “Memorial Day Massacre” in the opener. The Lakers came back to win Game 2 and took the series in six games, ending the long Celtics curse.

Riley only hinted at his displeasure after the game, bristling at the suggestion O’Neal hadn’t gotten the ball enough.

“It’s always about touches and that’s not what this game was about,” said Riley. “I just thought their energy and their effort far surpassed ours.”

In the really bad news for the Heat, the Mavericks look as if they have significant advantages in depth and talent too.

The Heat came into the evening chastened after blowing an early lead in Game 1 and spending the next two days vowing to throw the ball to O’Neal. O’Neal was gracious, vowing to play better and even doing one of his bits about coming from outer space (“I don’t know what planet it is, the files were destroyed”).

Not everyone was as amused as the media. When someone asked Jerry Stackhouse which planet he thought O’Neal was from, he rolled his eyes. “Oh man, I don’t have time for games, man,” Stackhouse said.

Unfortunately for the Heat, the problem wasn’t as easy as giving O’Neal the ball. It was Dallas Coach Avery Johnson’s strategy of double-teaming O’Neal, which is now so unconventional that Riley said O’Neal had to get accustomed to it.

“He has not seen a lot of double-teams in the last month,” said Riley between games. “He hasn’t. They didn’t double against Chicago. They didn’t double against Detroit.... So we really have to work on our spacing and he’s got to know where the guys are.”

O’Neal was averaging 20.4 points this postseason against single coverage, so with the Mavericks double-teaming, you can write him off as far as scoring a lot of points.

On the other hand, double-teaming O’Neal should have opened things up for Wade.

Riley accepted Johnson’s challenge, running the offense through O’Neal, inviting the double-team so O’Neal could pass to open teammates, which is what happened -- and then everything went dark.

O’Neal didn’t take this setback as graciously, refusing to make himself available to the media after the game. The league announced he had been fined $10,000, the team fined $25,000.

Putting the best possible face on it, presumably before putting on a show his modern-day players have never seen, Riley played the disrespect card.

“Everybody’s written our team off, even in Chicago” in the first round, Riley said. “We lost two games to Chicago and then we got buried by New Jersey in the first game” of their second-round series. “We were history.

“And then we were history against Detroit. So even when we were ahead, 3-1, we were history. I’m sure we’re history right now.”

Not quite, but they’re working on it.