It is the nature of sports that clarity get clouded by bad bounces and injuries and excuses, ifs and maybes telling a thousand lies, but the standings always give you the truth undistilled. You are what your record says you are, as bottom-line Bill Parcells used to say, and Miami's 30-35 record after Tuesday's crushing home loss to the Philadelphia Iversons tells us Miami is below average, period, end of discussion.

Forget about all the recent winning or the illusion the Heat has sold us since January, playing better basketball than anyone in a diluted Eastern Conference. There are no trophies given in the NBA for a couple of months of feel-good. Miami should be better, and isn't, and celebrating its resurgence from 5-23 is not unlike congratulating a corpse because it looks real good in the embalming fluid.

You keep hearing Miami's veterans haven't quit. Is that in and of itself supposed to feel like some sort of victory? That's a tribute to nothing more than our lowered standards and diminished expectations of athletes. Eddie Jones and Brian Grant each have more than 86 million reasons not to quit. It is their excessively-paying job not to quit. That Grant, for one, hasn't quit ought not cloud other issues, like why he hasn't been as good as his paycheck alleges he is.

We didn't quit! Is that the slogan that replaces Pat Riley's envisioned championship parade down Biscayne Blvd. now? Is that why this city has built this franchise not one but two new stadiums a few blocks from each other? So they would do us the courtesy of not quitting? Riley and all these guaranteed $86 million contracts weren't brought here to be 30-35. This team has not been true to its talent, and all this no-quit ought not obscure that.

The only one on this team to be saluted for his fight, the only one, is sick Alonzo Mourning because, even in his diminished state, he leads the league in desire. He is Iverson in a bigger body, heart outweighing even his talent, and it is a shame his teammates have betrayed him. It is a damning indictment of how flimsy a foundation this Miami team is built on when it starts shaking whenever Mourning so much as sneezes.

''There's no science to this,'' a broken Mourning said after this loss to Philadelphia. ``If we don't win, we're not in. We don't have to bring rocket scientists and oceanographers and brainiacs in here to figure that out.''

Oceanographers? This is the first time in NBA history the word ''oceanographer'' has been brought into an NBA locker room. This would have been the funniest thing about a rather somber Tuesday if 7-1 Vladimir Stepania hadn't unintentionally provided uproarious comedy at the end of the first half.

He did this by awkwardly attempting a buzzer-beating half-court shot. Even though the buzzer was more than five seconds from buzzing. Stepania came up about, oh, only half a court short.

You know how sometimes someone will say something funny and it'll become all the more funny because everyone starts laughing and then someone snorts and then someone starts crying? This was like that. Flash back-to-back-to-back from Stepania's pathetic attempt to the absurd amount of time left on the clock to the look on a disgusted Riley's face, and it really is something of a miracle that all other nine players on the court didn't fall on the floor convulsing with snorting laughter.

But at least Stepania didn't quit, right? That's what we're celebrating around Miami basketball now, marveling that Rod Strickland would dive for a loose ball Tuesday and forgetting that diving for a loose ball is what he's supposed to be doing. Still, seeing Strickland dive for a loose ball is only the NBA's fourth strangest sight, ranking behind Jerry Krause turning down cheesecake, Shawn Kemp avoiding a temptation and Jerry Stackhouse passing.

Riley complained of lost focus after this important game, and an example of it came from Eddie House with five minutes left. He couldn't be bothered with whatever was happening in the timeout huddle, getting distracted instead by a gyrating Heat dancer at center court who was shimmy-shaking her, um, pom-poms.

In the last two minutes, Heat fans fled the building as if a volcano were about to erupt, and Iverson stuck his tongue out at them and this season felt a little more doomed with every tick of that clock. As last year's playoffs proved, the team Miami is chasing, Charlotte, is better than the Heat, especially now that Jamal Mashburn has returned from injury -- and also has the advantage of a 2 ?-game lead for the final Eastern Conference playoff spot, plus an abundantly easier schedule.

Thirteen of Miami's remaining 17 games are against winning teams; only six of Charlotte's 16 are.