Miami Herald Runs “Congratulations Miami!” Macy’s Ad After Heat Lose NBA Finals

By KC Downey in Celtics, Featured, Now! ⋅ June 14, 2011 at 2:28am ⋅ Post a comment

Screengrab courtesy of miaminewtimes.com

No, it’s not quite as egregious as when U.S. President Harry Truman famously held up a newspaper declaring “Dewey Defeats Truman” shortly after Truman won the 1948 election. But, it’s still pretty bad.

Hours after the Miami Heat lost the NBA Title to the Mavericks in Game 6, the Miami Herald ran a Macy’s ad congratulating the Heat on winning the NBA Finals. The ad reads “Congratulations Miami!” in between images of championship t-shirts.

“We weren’t going to sit and wait around for Game 7 to decide how to advertise something like this,” Elissa Vanaver, the Herald’s vice president for human resources, told the Miami New Times. “That ad was in the system for the eventuality that the Heat ended up winning the title.”

The ad, of course, ran on the same page as the an article about the Miami point guards’ poor performance in the Finals (entitled, “Heat just never got the point during Finals loss to more-organized Mavs”). In a sub-head above the ad, it reads “DALLAS WINS BEST-OF-7 SERIES 4-2.”

OK, I’ll stop rubbing it in. You get the point. Fans across the country, specifically in Dallas and Cleveland, must have really enjoyed the paper’s mistake. I know I did.