The Heat are slipping

Marc Stein’s weekly rankings are out, and everyone in the lower part of Florida has taken the day off to mourn.

The Heat are not number four. Nor are they number 3 or number 5. They’re not even number 6. Along a related but opposite line of thinking, they’re not numbers eight, nine, or eleven. Not ten either.

We’ll let you take that info and deduce where exactly they fall in the rankings, while we gaze over Ira Winderman’s blog to see what he observed while Miami lost at home to the Magic last night.

Yet there’s no denying that LeBron James’ Cleveland Cavaliers, who halted New Jersey’s 14-game win streak Saturday and have a 10-1 record since March 14, deserve their promotion into the top five of ESPN.com’s NBA Power Rankings.

It remains to be seen if James’ inexperienced gang is ready to win a playoff series, but the Cavs’ surge — coupled with the return of Larry Hughes — edges them past the Suns and Heat to account for one significant shift in the upper reaches of the rankings…

Oh!

Why, it seems a simple error in cutting and pasting has caused us to accidentally post text from Stein’s analysis of the Cavaliers’ super-strong #5 ranking! Oh, goodness! For shame!

We meant to give you an excerpt from the Winderman thing, where he talks about the Heat’s lack of focus, weak supporting cast, and hopeless Pat Riley playing zone defense. (Not himself – he had his team do it.)

It’s hard watching Shaq get old. We’ll have more to say about this some other time, but we’re reminded of something our father said to us when we went to see Shaq play early in his career. “Son,” he said, “this nice lady here is my mistress. You tell your mom about this and I’ll never like you again.”