Miami Heat

The Miami Heat is an American professional basketball team based in Miami, Florida. The Heat compete in the National Basketball Association (NBA) as a member of the league's Eastern Conference Southeast Division. They play their home games at the American Airlines Arena in Downtown Miami. The team owner is Micky Arison, who also owns cruise-ship giant Carnival Corporation. The team president and de facto general manager is Pat Riley, and the head coach is Erik Spoelstra. The mascot of the team is Burnie, an anthropomorphic fireball.

Formed in 1988 as an expansion franchise, the Heat have won three league championships (in 2006, 2012 and 2013), five conference titles and 11 division titles. From February 3 to March 27, 2013, the Heat won 27 games in a row, the second-longest streak in NBA history (after the 1971–72 Los Angeles Lakers' 33 wins). In 2016, Forbes valued the Heat at $1.3 billion as the tenth most valuable among NBA franchises.

The Heat are not related to the Miami Floridians, an ABA team in the early 1970s, although the Heat have occasionally paid tribute to the older franchise by wearing a replica version of the Floridians' uniforms for the NBA's "Hardwood Classics Nights" during the 2005–06 and 2011–12 seasons.

Miami

Miami (/maɪˈæmi/; Spanish pronunciation: [maiˈami]) is a city located on the Atlantic coast in southeastern Florida and the county seat of Miami-Dade County. The 44th-most populated city proper in the United States, with a population of 417,650, it is the principal, central, and most populous city of the Miami metropolitan area, and the most populous metropolis in the Southeastern United States after Washington, D.C. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Miami's metro area is the eighth-most populous and fourth-largest urban area in the United States, with a population of around 5.5 million.

Miami is a major center, and a leader in finance, commerce, culture, media, entertainment, the arts, and international trade. In 2012, Miami was classified as an Alpha−World City in the World Cities Study Group's inventory. In 2010, Miami ranked seventh in the United States in terms of finance, commerce, culture, entertainment, fashion, education, and other sectors. It ranked 33rd among global cities. In 2008, Forbes magazine ranked Miami "America's Cleanest City", for its year-round good air quality, vast green spaces, clean drinking water, clean streets, and city-wide recycling programs. According to a 2009 UBS study of 73 world cities, Miami was ranked as the richest city in the United States, and the world's fifth-richest city in terms of purchasing power. Miami is nicknamed the "Capital of Latin America", is the second largest U.S. city with a Spanish-speaking majority, and the largest city with a Cuban-American plurality.

History of the Miami Heat

The Miami Heat are an American professional basketball team based in Miami, Florida. The team was launched in 1988 and played in the 1988–89 season of the National Basketball Association. The next season they moved from the Western Conference to the Atlantic Division of the Eastern Conference. After a mainly mediocre performance in the first few seasons, there were extensive team changes in 1995 and 1996 under head coach Pat Riley, including the recruitment of Isaac Austin and P.J. Brown. They reached the Eastern Conference Finals for the first time in 1996-97. They did not reach this level again until 2004-05, under new head coach Stan Van Gundy and with Dwyane Wade as a leading team member. At this time they transferred to the Southeast Division. The next year the team won the NBA Finals, defeating the Dallas Mavericks. The head coach position was next taken by Erik Spoelstra. Their next successful season was 2010-11, when they reached the NBA Finals again, losing to the Mavericks. Acquiring LeBron James as a player, they won the Finals in both 2012 and 2013, and won 27 successive games in February-March 2013. In 2013-14 they reached the Finals again but lost to San Antonio Spurs. James left the team in July 2014, and the 2014-15 season was less successful.

National Basketball Association

The National Basketball Association (NBA) is the pre-eminent men's professional basketball league in North America, and is widely considered to be the premier men's professional basketball league in the world. It has 30 franchised member clubs (29 in the United States and 1 in Canada), and is an active member of USA Basketball (USAB), which is recognized by FIBA (also known as the International Basketball Federation) as the national governing body for basketball in the United States. The NBA is one of the four major North American professional sports leagues. NBA players are the world's best paid sportsmen, by average annual salary per player.

The league was founded in New York City on June 6, 1946, as the Basketball Association of America (BAA). The league adopted the name National Basketball Association on August 3, 1949, after merging with its rival National Basketball League (NBL). The league's several international as well as individual team offices are directed out of its head offices located in the Olympic Tower at 645 Fifth Avenue in New York City. NBA Entertainment and NBA TV studios are directed out of offices located in Secaucus, New Jersey.

Heat

In physics, heat is energy as it spontaneously passes between a system and its surroundings, other than as work or with the transfer of matter. In thermodynamics, finer detail of the process of transfer is in principle unspecified. When there is a suitable physical pathway, heat transfer occurs from a hotter to a colder body. The transfer can be direct, by contact, from the source to the destination body, as in conduction combined with radiation, or remote, as in radiation without conduction; or indirect, by conduction and radiation through a thick solid wall, or by way of an intermediate fluid body, as in convective circulation.

Originally, quantity of heat transferred was measured by how much it changed the states of participating bodies, for example, as amount of ice melted, or change in temperature, without work or matter transfer. Such measurement is possible because many bodies, over most temperature ranges, expand reversibly on being heated. This is called thermal expansion.