The Miami Heat Are Going to Lose the NBA Finals Because DJ Khaled Accidentally Cursed Them

San Antonio was burning.

Temperatures climbed in the AT&T Center. Eighty degrees. Ninety. White hot. The Miami Heat suffered. LeBron James’s legs cramped, so stiff he couldn’t walk. Was this what rigor mortis felt like? Mario Chalmers felt the swelter suffocate that part of his brain that reminded him how to play basketball. The ball slipped out of his formless fingers. Birdman’s wing tattoos started flapping wildly. Were they supposed to do that? On their side of the court, the Spurs meditated in their folding chairs, unfazed by the heat and holy with the grim reckoning of victory.

Deep within the murky bowels of the AT&T Center, a lone Spurs stadium employee finished chopping up the extension cord that connected the air conditioning system to its power supply. Outside, he rode past the parking lot’s limits, through the desiccated chaparral to the place where the sun burns all night. He scorched the extension cord pieces through a magnifying glass and buried them deep in the dirt. Inside the stadium, the temperature kept rising. The Spurs kept winning.

Eleven hundred miles away in Miami, DJ Khaled had his ear to the ground. The streets were speaking to him. They told him what had happened, they sent him visions of the deliberately broken stadium AC system. The Spurs had only won because they overheated the Heat. Was it true? He had to tell someone.

He had to tell Skip Bayless.

Game 5 of the NBA Finals happens Sunday night. The San Antonio Spurs will win, clinching the series over the Miami Heat four games to one. Analysts will attribute the incredible victory that no one expected to happen at all, let alone in five games, to things like the Spurs’ breathtakingly creative playmaking, the Kawhi Leonard Experience, or the Heat’s sudden inability to put five NBA-caliber players on the floor at the same time. Do not believe them.

The Spurs will cruise to victory because DJ Khaled cursed the Heat.

As part of a bizarro NBA Finals “First Take” segment held at some sort of really shitty-looking Miami pool party with United Nations décor earlier this week, ESPN2 brought DJ Khaled on as a representative of the Heat’s fanbase. Khaled unequivocally promised victories in the third and fourth games, which the Heat ended up losing by a combined score of 218 to 178. Neither game was even close—the Spurs put Game 3 away early, shooting a ludicrous, Finals-record-setting 75.8 percent from the field in the first half. A gassed Heat team shit the bed in Game 4, with LeBron their only player to score more than 12 points. In the two games since Khaled laid down the gauntlet, the Spurs have looked unbeatable.

Heat fans might as well leave the season early because DJ Khaled doomed them when he suggested the unimpeachable Spurs were cheating. He blasphemed. He forgot the voodoo power the rap game holds over the basketball game.

“They won that one game ‘cause they were cheaters,” Khaled said. “They won, but they cheated.”

“Who’s your source on that?” asked an incredulous Skip Bayless, a man who believed that Tim Tebow was a viable NFL quarterback and that Jordan had no help on the Bulls. Skip Bayless is monumentally foolish. It’s really hard to make him look like the sensible one.

“I respect everyone, right? But I can’t respect somebody turning the AC off and cheating,” Khaled continued. “I can’t do it. And the streets, the streets are saying they cheated.”

Sadly, the cheating allegation is wrong, but now there’s a clearly a curse on the Heat. Khaled claimed false confidence in the streets, and the roiling hellscape that lies deep beneath those streets has risen up to assert itself. Anyone who doubts that rappers have explicit control over what happens in basketball should put those misconceptions to rest. Khaled himself didn’t know how much power he had. We can trace cursed basketball back to the Based God, who famously damned Kevin Durant after the Oklahoma City star confessed to not liking B’s music. Durant won the MVP award this year, but Lil B willed the Spurs to bounce his Thunder from the Conference Finals.

Khaled’s not even the only one hexing the Heat. Lil Wayne, ejected from a 2013 Heat game after leading the crowd in a “Fuck Miami Heat” chant, also stopped by “First Take” the next day to claim that he was an L.A. Lakers and Kobe Bryant fan, further dismissing Miami.

To be fair, the Spurs aren't just benefiting from Wayne deliberately and Khaled inadvertently tearing down the Heat’s temple. The team with the longest run of dominance in the NBA (the core nucleus has won three championships) has a sturdy, pious foundation built by several rap luminaries. Wayne himself honored cornerstone center Tim Duncan’s 17-season Spurs career in “Burn” (“Stayed on the same team like Tim Duncan”). The Game has cited the prowess of guard Tony Parker in “Money” (“Ball like that nigga Tony Parker do it”) and the height of smooth Frenchman Boris Diaw in “Who Do You Love” (“Ballin’ in the club / Money tall as Boris Diaw”). And in “When You Gonna Drop,” Lil Boosie went for the Spurs trifecta: “Hit you from my way look like Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, and Manu Ginobili.” Hip-hop has handed down the verdict, and poor Khaled made sure to put the Heat on ice.

The streets told you false, Khaled. Sometimes, air conditioners just malfunction. The Heat are fucked. The curse is real.

Devin Schiff is only a fair weather fan when the AC goes out. He's on Twitter - @devinschiff

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