You can bet money the Heat have been warned to shut up...

So we end up with Mavs in 5, Heat in 5.

And we can all thank Joachim Noah and Luol Dang for that one.

In the first quarter of Game 3, Joachim Noah is shown, on-camera, uttering yet another NBA anti-gay slur into the crowd. For this, he is fined $50,000.

For this, all but certainly, the Chicago Bulls and Barack Obama won no more games in the series.

In the three games (thank you again to Brian Tuohy -- Brian now has a huge picture of the only three relevant players in the NBA on his NBA Playoffs page) -- the game he uttered the slur and the two games afterward, the free throws went as follows:

Game 3: Heat 29-21
Game 4: Heat 38-22
Game 5: Heat 33-21, in Chicago, with Chicago on the verge of elimination!

I mentioned Luol Dang earlier -- he made probably the comment which sealed the Bulls' fate, as he basically said he was willing to go into the stands and punch fans for making comments like that which drew the anti-gay slur:

"But at the same time, there's times where a fan like that, honestly I feel like jumping in the crowd and hitting him," Deng said. "We're humans, and the camera is not on that fan at all."

(Source: ESPN)

After the infamous Malice at the Palace, do you honestly believe the NBA is going to allow that to go on?

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Prediction: With it being a 2-3-2 format, I do think the series will go 6. I actually had the Heat winning in 5, before I remembered that the series was 2-3-2, and not 2-2-1-1-1 like all the other rounds.

Key statistic: The Heat are 12-3 in the playoffs. In free throw attempt margin, the Heat are, similarly, 12-3. (1 game in the Celtics series, the first two games in Chicago in the Bulls series.)

The Mavericks are 7-8.