Takeaways from Heat’s win over Kings to end losing skid, and how tweaks to rotation helped
Last week was a nightmare for the Miami Heat. But this week is off to a much better start.
The Heat (48-28) opened a new week with a much-needed 123-100 blowout win over the struggling Sacramento Kings (27-49) on Monday night at FTX Arena to end a season-long four-game losing skid.
With the victory, the Heat moved back into first place in the Eastern Conference standings. The second-place Philadelphia 76ers, third-place Milwaukee Bucks and fourth-place Boston Celtics are all just one game behind the Heat.
“My food is going to taste better tonight, in my opinion,” center Bam Adebayo said after the Heat’s first win in over a week.
Behind a new starting lineup featuring Max Strus in place of Duncan Robinson and some tweaks to the rotation, the Heat dominated from the start. Miami outscored Sacramento 31-19 in the first quarter and entered halftime ahead by 16 points.
The Heat eventually extended its lead to as many as 26 points in the second half with the help of an ultra-efficient shooting performance.
In the win, the Heat shot 54.4 percent from the field and 19 of 40 (47.5 percent) from three-point range.
Jimmy Butler led the way for Miami with 27 points while shooting 10 of 14 from the field and hitting a season-high three threes, to go along with five rebounds and seven assists.
Adebayo finished with 22 points and 15 rebounds.
Tyler Herro contributed 20 points on 8-of-15 shooting from the field and 4-of-8 shooting on threes, five rebounds and six assists off the Heat’s bench.
The Kings were missing their top two scorers in De’Aaron Fox and Domantas Sabonis because of injuries. Davion Mitchell scored a team-high 21 points for Sacramento.
“It’s always good to win, especially at home,” Butler said. “We made a few tweaks and got back to being who we are. Guard somebody, playing in the open floor, making shots, share the ball with one another. That’s the way that we want to look and that’s the way that we want to play.”
With just six games left in the regular season, the Heat now hits the road for a three-game trip that begins Wednesday against the Celtics in a matchup filled with playoff-seeding implications.
Here are five takeaways from the Heat’s win over the Kings:
The Heat didn’t just snap a losing skid. Miami’s offensive slump also came to an end.
During its string of four straight losses, the Heat scored at a pace of only 109.1 points per 100 possessions for the NBA’s eighth-worst offensive rating during that stretch. Miami also shot 46.1 percent from the field (ranked 20th) and 33.8 percent from three-point range (ranked 20th) during its four-game losing streak.
In addition, Miami averaged an NBA-low 77.5 shot attempts per game because of turnover issues and poor rebounding during this span.
But the Heat’s offense looked rejuvenated against a Kings defense that entered ranked third-worst in the NBA.
Miami shot 54.4 percent from the field and 19 of 40 (47.5 percent) on threes. The Heat also took 90 shots with the help of 10 offensive rebounds.
“We finally put some points on the board,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said. “That’s been frustrating for all of us and we need to continue to get better. But the ball and body movement was better. Less holding, we were moving the ball, guys were able to play to their strengths. But it was less stagnant for sure.”
The Heat was sharp from the start, totaling 57 points on 51.2 percent shooting from the field and 8-of-17 (47.1 percent) shooting on threes in the first half.
In the end, the Heat scored at a pace of 128.1 points per 100 possessions on Monday. That’s Miami’s sixth-best single-game offensive rating of the season, and the Heat improved to 17-0 when finishing with an offensive rating of better than 120 points scored per 100 possessions.
Monday was a step in the right direction for the Heat’s offense, albeit against weak competition.
The losing pushed the Heat to make a change to its starting lineup, with Strus starting in place of Robinson.
The rest of the Heat’s usual starting lineup remained intact, as Strus started alongside Kyle Lowry, Butler, P.J. Tucker and Adebayo. It marked the first time this lineup has started a game for the Heat this season, as this five-man combination entered outscoring teams by an impressive 12.8 points per 100 possessions but in a very limited sample size of 13 minutes together.
This Heat lineup wasn’t dominant but it again produced positive results on Monday, opening the game with a 12-11 lead before the first reserve entered. And this group outscored the Kings 20-18 to start the second half before the Heat turned to its bench.
The Lowry-Strus-Butler-Tucker-Adebayo lineup finished with a plus/minus of plus-two in 13 minutes on Monday.
“It’s mostly the same,” Adebayo said when asked what changes about the way the starting group functions with Strus in place of Robinson. “We watched film today and got our spacing right. We felt like this was the game that we really needed to work on spacing and getting back to our old habits. So we were moving the ball and everybody felt like they got a touch.”
Strus, who turned 26 on Monday, finished with eight points on 2-of-9 shooting on threes, three rebounds and two assists in 30 minutes.
Monday marked just the sixth game this season that Robinson has been used as a reserve. His first five games as a reserve came in January after he exited COVID-19 protocols.
Robinson, who signed a five-year, $90 million contract with the Heat last summer, has been a fixture in the Heat’s starting lineup. Along with making 67 starts this season, he started in all 72 of his regular-season appearances last season and in 68 of his 73 regular-season appearances in 2019-20.
Robinson first entered Monday’s game with 3:29 left in the first quarter and ended up logging 25 minutes. He was effective, finishing with 15 points on 5-of-8 shooting from deep.
What changes for Robinson when playing off the bench?
“Not a whole lot,” he said. “Nothing really changes, maybe just who I’m playing with. But just still try to be aggressive and do what I do.”
The Heat’s new rotation did not include Victor Oladipo or Markieff Morris.
Nobody on the team has blamed Oladipo and/or Morris for the Heat’s recent struggles, but the losses began piling up soon after they both returned from extended absences earlier this month. Miami is 3-3 in the games that Oladipo has played in this season after returning from knee surgery and 2-4 in the six games that Morris has played in after missing four months with a neck injury.
On Monday, the Heat turned to a rotation that did not include Oladipo or Morris despite both being available to play.
Along with starting Lowry, Strus, Butler, Tucker and Adebayo, the Heat used Tyler Herro, Dewayne Dedmon, Robinson and Gabe Vincent off the bench to complete its nine-man rotation.
Caleb Martin (calf contusion) was the only player on the Heat’s 15-man roster who was not available against the Kings. Martin is expected to rejoin the rotation when he returns, but it remains to be seen whose spot he’ll take.
“Look, these are tough decisions and there’s a lot of different things that could work,” Spoelstra said of the tweaks made to the Heat’s rotation ahead of Monday’s win. “We just felt at this time, this particular time, that these moves may clean up some things with the rotation. But those aren’t easy things.
“I think we all just have to have empathy and grace for some of these changes for the guys that didn’t necessarily play tonight and understanding that we have a roster full of proven capable guys, and we’re going to need everybody particularly as we get this final push and get into the playoffs. A lot of this is going to be matchup based.”
Only time will tell if the Heat will stick to this rotation or continue to adjust as it works to find the right lineup combinations before the start of the playoffs.
Spoelstra called the Kings “the perfect team for us to play against” before the game. And it turned out to be true.
Spoelstra made that comment because the Kings would test the Heat’s defense with its relentlessly attacking offense. Sacramento entered among the league leaders in paint points and averaging the fifth-most drives to the basket per game this season.
But the Kings ended up being the “perfect team” for the Heat to play on Monday, as it looked to snap its season-long four-game losing skid, because they aren’t very good and were missing their two best players.
Sacramento owns the NBA’s sixth-worst record and was missing its top two scorers against Miami — Fox (right hand soreness) and Sabonis (left knee contusion). The Kings were also without Terence Davis (right wrist recovery), Richaun Holmes (personal reasons) and Josh Jackson (non-COVID illness) against the Heat.
Of course that doesn’t guarantee anything, with the Heat falling to a 76ers team missing the All-Star duo of Joel Embiid and James Harden, a Golden State Warriors team missing Stephen Curry, Draymond Green and Klay Thompson and the middling New York Knicks in recent days.
But the Heat was able to take advantage of an overmatched opponent on Monday.
The Heat moved back into first place in the East.
After dropping out of first place in recent days, the Heat moved past the Celtics and back into the top spot with Monday’s win. The Celtics — playing without Jaylen Brown, Jayson Tatum, Al Horford and Robert Williams III — fell to the Toronto Raptors in overtime on Monday.
With six games left on Miami’s schedule, the first-place Heat stands one game ahead of the Celtics, Bucks and 76ers.
Big games between those teams loom this week, with the Bucks and 76ers facing off on Tuesday in Philadelphia and the Heat and Celtics facing off in Boston on Wednesday.
With the four teams so close in the standings, tiebreakers could come into play.
The Heat is on track to finish with the edge in a two-team tie with the Bucks and 76ers because it owns the better conference record after splitting the season series with both teams. A three-team tie between Miami, Milwaukee and Philadelphia would be more complicated to sort out.
But the Celtics have already clinched the head-to-head tiebreaker over the Heat regardless of what happens in Wednesday’s game between the two teams. The Celtics won the first two games of the three-game season series.
This story was originally published March 28, 2022 at 9:45 PM.
