MIAMI — The relationship between the Miami Heat‘s Mario Chalmers and the team’s fan base can be best described as being like a yo-yo.
Some nights Chalmers shows flashes of why he is nicknamed ‘Super Mario.’ Other nights he has Heat fans wishing they could send him to the same island that Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled to.
That dynamic in the way Chalmers plays has him always coming into a season with something to prove. That could be more true this time around as he’s coming into training camp as a defending champion.
Having being a starter since his rookie season, Chalmers hasn’t truly had any legitimate challengers to that spot for the majority of his four-year NBA career. The only other notable players at the point guard position on the Heat roster before last season were Carlos Arroyo and Mike Bibby.
Chalmers would only lose his starting job in the 2011 playoffs to Bibby out of a need for playoff experience. Besides that, Chalmers has been the starter mainly due to his tenacity on defense and it looked like that wouldn’t change.
Then in 2011 NBA Draft, via a draft day trade, the Heat would land a point guard from Cleveland State University in the first round named Norris Cole. That pick gave Chalmers something he hasn’t experienced as an NBA player, actual competition.
Cole showed early on that he wasn’t scared of the NBA spotlight with a 20 point performance in the home opener against the Boston Celtics. That made him an immediate fan favorite. It might have also woken up Chalmers to the posibility of truly being replaced as the #1 point guard on the Heat.
Even as Cole hit the expected rookie wall late in the season, Chalmers still in some ways had to show that he deserved the starting job.
Now with a full training camp awaiting him, Chalmers has as much to show as ever. Luckily for him, Chalmers has both the biggest bravado on the Heat and a knack for coming up big in the championship spotlight. Nowhere was this more evident than Game 4 of the NBA Finals as he scored 25 points, including 12 in the fourth quarter.
That performance helped Miami overcome a historic game by Russell Westbrook of the Oklahoma City Thunder to both win the game and take a commanding 3-1 series lead. This situation of having a young gun in Cole behind him is new to Chalmers. It puts more pressure on him from the fans than ever before in his young career.
He has to show that the yo-yo will be up more from now on.
