Spoelstra was ticked. Adebayo searched for answers. Takeaways from another Heat loss
The Miami Heat suffered one of its most frustrating losses of the season coming out of the NBA All-Star Game, falling to the Atlanta Hawks, 129-124, to end a six-game road swing. Here are five takeaways from the loss:
1. Heat couldn’t stop Trae Young and Erik Spoelstra was peeved.
Erik Spoelstra decided he was done talking after answering two questions. Bam Adebayo and Jimmy Butler pored over the final box score for minutes, as they walked out of the shower and to their lockers at State Farm Arena. Adebayo took a long sigh and stared at the floor while he tried to come up with some satisfying answer to a question about the Heat’s ongoing defensive struggles away from Miami.
“This has been an all-season thing,” the All-Star said. “This has been happening for the whole season. We just—I don’t know, bro. I’m running out of solutions for you.”
It was the most exasperated the Heat has been after a loss all season. Miami opened the second half of the season with an upset loss to one of the worst teams in the NBA because Trae Young put together his first 50-point game.
The decisive play, though, was a dunk by Hawks combo guard Cam Reddish off a turnover by guard Goran Dragic to put Atlanta ahead 126-124 with 31.6 seconds left. A possession earlier, rookie small forward De’Andre Hunter tied the game at 124-124 on a three-pointer. Two possessions before, Hawks post player John Collins got loose for an unassisted dunk to cut the Heat’s lead to 124-121.
Miami’s defensive issues were more widespread than just the 50 points it gave up to Young, who went 12 of 25 from the field and 8 of 15 from three-point range, with eight assists and seven turnovers
“I think overall the game as a whole we just didn’t guard it the way that we talked about it, the way that we said we were going to guard and that’s from the beginning of the year,” Butler said. “We’ve just got to get better on the defensive end.”
Atlanta closed the game on a 10-0 run to turn a five-point deficit into a five-point win in front of 17,356 in Georgia. The Hawks shot 48.2 percent from the field and 45.7 percent — 16 of 35 — from three. Atlanta went 31 of 35 from the free-throw line and Young went 18 of 19 from the stripe.
“The areas that we really needed to do a better job obviously were the fouls,” Spoelstra said to answer one of the two questions he fielded. “He just got into such an incredible rhythm.”
Butler said he and Adebayo were looking at the same thing when they spent a few minutes staring a box score on the floor of the visitors’ locker room. The two numbers which popped out to him were the Hawks’ 35 free-throw attempts and the Heat’s 15 turnovers, three of which came in the last 63 seconds. Those turnovers turned into 20 points, including the go-ahead basket.
“What I look at is how many times we did foul, how many turnovers we had and that’s the game for you,” Butler said. “That’s the difference in the game, especially for us.”
2. Miami Heat road woes.
It’s impossible to talk about Miami’s defensive struggles without also folding in its road woes. The Heat has now dropped 5 of 6, all on the road.
Miami is 22-3 at AmericanAirlines Arena this year and now just 13-17 on the road. The Heat is allowing 106.0 points per game at home and now 110.9 on the road. Opponents are shooting 45.5 percent from the field when Miami is on the road as opposed to 43.6 percent at home.
“At home we’re tough because we guard and we also make shots,” Butler said, “but on the road we just tend to leave our defense behind.”
While Jae Crowder hasn’t been with the Heat long, the forward has now been around for most of Miami’s worst six-game stretch of the season. Crowder debuted in the Heat’s loss to the Portland Trail Blazers on Feb. 9 after the Memphis Grizzlies traded him to Miami and he’s now just 1-3 with the Heat, with all of his appearances coming on the road.
It’s too early for him to diagnose what’s wrong, of course. Still, he admitted the road woes are weighing on Miami.
“It’s in our mind,” Crowder said. “We have to focus in on closing games out and doing it on the defensive end, obviously. I feel like we have enough scoring in the locker room, but we’ve got to find a way to get on the same page defensively.”
3. Heat couldn’t survive without Bam Adebayo and Jimmy Butler.
Spoelstra mentioned last month how Dwyane Wade changed when he returned from his first trip to the NBA All-Star Game. He thought a similar transformation might be in store for Adebayo, who played in his first All-Star Game on Sunday.
The early returns are overwhelmingly positive. Adebayo was the Heat’s alpha Thursday. The star post player scored a team-high 28 points, grabbed 19 rebounds, dished out seven assists and grabbed three steals. He scored Miami’s last seven points and 10 of its last 12, creating off the dribble and hitting a midrange jumper. Adebayo even successfully forced a missed three by Young when the Heat gave him the assignment of shutting down the All-Star point guard for a possession.
“He showed us why he’s a hell of a young player in this league at a very young age and how he can handle guarding, scoring on both ends of the floor,” Butler said. “He’s going to have to play like that for the rest of the time being and for the rest of his career.”
Butler was no slouch, either. The All-Star wing finished with 17 points, eight rebounds, nine assists and two steals, although he was just 6 of 18 from the field and missed a potential go-ahead three-pointer with 25 seconds left.
When Adebayo and Butler were on the court together, the Heat outscored the Hawks by 14 in the 34 minutes they shared the floor. When neither Adebayo nor Butler were in, Atlanta outscored Miami by 19.
The most dire stretch came at the end of the first quarter and into the second, when Adebayo and Butler spent most of 7:35 together on the bench, save for a six-second stretch when Adebayo came in to play defense. The Hawks went on a 19-9 run and pushed the lead up to 52-41 with a 15-0 run, which ended after they finally returned. Atlanta outscored the Heat, 31-28, in the second quarter, then outscored Miami, 39-27, in the fourth quarter, which began with a 7-0 run by the Hawks to tie the game at 97-97 when neither Adebayo nor Butler were in.
“The cumulative scores each quarter, that’s the biggest thing that stood out to me,” Adebayo said. “We’ve got to get stops. That’s the solution right there. You’ve just got to guard.”
4. Kendrick Nunn is back on track.
Foul trouble was the only thing to slow down Kendrick Nunn, who had encouraging start to the second half.
The guard ran into his latest rookie wall right before NBA All-Star Weekend. He came back from a left Achilles tendon injury Feb. 1 to play the final seven games before the break and he clearly wasn’t himself. Nunn, who had positioned himself as an unlikely Rookie of the Year with a dominant first three months to his career, averaged 16.2 points per game in his first 44 games while shooting 46.1 percent from the field and 35.6 percent from three. In the seven games before All-Star Weekend, Nunn averaged just 9.9 points on 29.8-percent shooting and 24.3-percent shooting from three.
There were signs he was back on track Friday when he scored 17 points in the Rising Stars Challenge in Chicago. He continued Thursday, scoring 14 points on 5-of-8 shooting with two assists. In the first quarter alone, Nunn scored nine points on 3-of-3 shooting before foul trouble — and an inability to guard Young — limited him the rest of the way.
5. Miami Heat rotation hints.
Injuries have forced the Heat into smaller lineups lately. Meyers Leonard has started all 49 games he has played this season as a more traditional center to pair with Adebayo, but the post player missed his sixth straight game Wednesday, forcing Miami to use its 10th different starting lineup this season. The Heat tried playing post player Kelly Olynyk next to Adebayo for a few games before the All-Star break, then used high-flying forward Derrick Jones Jr. as a small-ball power forward for a few games. With Jones battling a bruised left shin, the Heat turned to Crowder on Thursday.
It was only the start of some new approaches for Spoelstra coming out of All-Star weekend. Miami went 10 deep in the first 10 minutes and used wing Solomon Hill, who also came over in the trade-deadline deal with the Grizzlies and hadn’t yet played, as the sixth man.
In crunch time, two of the three new additions were on the court, as Adebayo, Butler and Dragic shared the court with Crowder, and wing Andre Iguodala.
This story was originally published February 21, 2020 at 12:00 AM.
