A look at what hurt Heat’s offense in opener. And Jimmy Butler questionable for Christmas
The Miami Heat spent two months last season playing playoff games with high stakes attached to them on its way to the NBA Finals. Each of the Heat’s 21 games during that postseason run was dissected and often helped form the narrative for the gap of days between games.
Less than three months after Miami’s playoff run in the Walt Disney World bubble came to an end just two wins short of an NBA championship, the Heat began the 2020-21 season with an uncharacteristic offensive performance Wednesday in a 113-107 loss to the Orlando Magic at the Amway Center.
An 0-1 start to the regular season, though, is very different than an 0-1 hole in a best-of-7 playoff series. The Heat knows that.
“First game,” center Bam Adebayo said, with the Heat looking to bounce back in its Christmas Day home opener against the New Orleans Pelicans at AmericanAirlines Arena on Friday (noon, Fox Sports Sun and ESPN). “That’s no excuse. But as we get into the flow of games, we’re going to get better with our turnovers, we’ll get better with our actions, with our fluidity in the flow of the game. It was just one of those games.”
A loss that would have felt like the beginning of the end for the Heat in the playoffs just a few months ago feels like it’s likely just a blip at the start of a shortened 72-game regular season.
“I think we were just really, really excited to play against somebody else and it counts. That’s part of it,” Heat wing Jimmy Butler said. “I don’t think you can look too much into one game. We just know we’ve got to be better. We’ve got to take care of the ball. We’ve got to get back to sharing the ball the way that we’re capable of. I’d say tonight that they beat us, but I’d like to believe that we beat ourselves.”
The Heat, which returns 13 players from a team that recorded the NBA’s seventh-best offensive rating (111.9 points per 100 possessions) last season, scored just 100.9 points per 100 possessions in Wednesday’s opener.
Turnovers were to blame for a lot of those offensive struggles, as Orlando scored 24 points off 22 turnovers from Miami. As a result, the Magic finished with five more shots than the Heat despite finishing with 18 of its own turnovers.
“You have to give Orlando credit,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said. “They are active. They are long. They’re disruptive. They were top five in steals last year. They did the same thing in the short preseason. So you have to be very precise. Your spacing has to be great. And you have to be willing to work the offense and sometimes makes the easy play and get it to the second side, and execute from there.”
Miami committed 14.9 turnovers per game last regular season and 13.2 turnovers per game during its impressive playoff run.
“I feel like turnovers was the real reason why we lost the game,” Adebayo said. “We’re going to fix that. I feel like we were out of sync. We weren’t all on the same page today, so once we all get on the same page and get in sync, I feel like we won’t have 22 turnovers.”
Another important barometer for the Heat’s offense and ball movement that makes it go is the amount of three-point shots it takes and makes. Miami, which averaged 13.4 made threes on 35.4 three-point attempts per game last season, shot 7 of 20 on threes in Orlando.
The Heat posted a 5-11 regular-season record last season when making 10 or fewer threes in a game.
“There are a lot of different factors,” Spoelstra said when asked about the Heat’s low three-point numbers in the opener. “One, empty possessions. Two, we didn’t get the necessary ball movement. We were pretty much a first-trigger team tonight trying to get everything on that first action. And Orlando is too good of a defensive team to do that consistently over the course of the game. Thirdly, they’re a good defensive team.”
The Magic, which finished last season with a sold defensive rating that ranked 11th-best in the NBA, did not face the Heat’s usual ball movement that leads to open threes Wednesday. The Heat, which averaged 292.4 passes per game last season, made 272 passes in the opener, according to NBA Advanced Stats.
“As far as ball movement, everybody knows how we play, so the ball doesn’t stick in anybody’s hands,” Adebayo said. “We play one of those offenses where everybody is a threat and that’s how we like it, that’s how we want to play. Obviously, me and Jimmy — we handle most of the load, but all our teammates know they’re threats. And that’s how we want to play.
“We don’t want to play selfish basketball. Me and Jimmy are the two most unselfish teammates, so we look to get our guys involved. That’s how we want to play. It’s funner that way and we feel like if we keep playing that way, we’re turning this around. So it’s just one game, and we can’t hang our heads on that.”
Wednesday’s opener did not reflect what coaches saw from Miami’s offense in preseason practices, and it did not look like the offense that helped push the Heat to the NBA Finals last season.
Luckily for the Heat, it’s just one game.
“Two days ago we had a fantastic offensive practice,” Spoelstra said following Wednesday’s opener. “The ball was really popping, it was moving. It looked exactly opposite of what you saw tonight. Tonight that wasn’t winning offensive basketball. Obviously, with the mistakes and we just did not work our triggers and our offense well enough and sharing it and seeing what would happen if it got to the weak side. But we’ve had the overwhelming majority of our practices, the ball really moves. That was disappointing that it didn’t carry over to the game tonight.”
BUTLER QUESTIONABLE
Butler is listed as questionable for the Heat’s Christmas Day game against the Pelicans because of a sprained right ankle. He tweaked his right ankle during Wednesday’s season-opening loss to the Magic.
The only other Heat player on Thursday’s injury report is two-way contract player Gabe Vincent, who is questionable for Friday’s contest because he’s still recovering from a right knee procedure.
This story was originally published December 24, 2020 at 11:54 AM.
