Injuries, poor three-point shooting help to end Heat’s season: ‘It feels heartbreaking’
Minutes after the Miami Heat’s season came to an abrupt end in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference finals, an emotional Erik Spoelstra walked to the podium for his postgame press conference.
“It’s just one of those really tough moments,” the Heat coach said following Sunday’s 100-96 season-ending loss to the Boston Celtics at FTX Arena on Sunday night “You can’t prepare for it. You’re not thinking about it. It’s one of the worst feelings in the world to address your locker room after a game like this. When it ends, it ends in a thud. I have just so much incredible respect and love for everybody in the locker room and what everybody gave to this team.
“We had such a memorable season and postseason. It felt like five seasons in one, all the different chapters and adversity that this group was able to overcome.”
The Heat finished one win short of advancing to the NBA Finals for the seventh time in franchise history and the second time in the last three seasons.
In a way, the Heat finished just one shot short of punching a ticket to the NBA Finals. Trailing by two points in the final minute of Game 7 of the East finals, star Jimmy Butler missed what would have been a go-ahead three-pointer with 16.6 seconds left in the fourth quarter.
“We want to win just like everybody else,” Butler said. “Everything we put into this game day in and day out is toward winning. That’s the only thing we care about here in the Miami Heat organization. But I like it because we can learn from it. I can learn from it as much as anybody else. In my book, I just think I can’t have bad games. I played like trash in a couple. I think that was the series.”
Butler blamed himself, but he’s the biggest reason why the Heat was even able to push the East finals to seven games despite injuries limiting several key players. Yes, Butler totaled just 19 points on 7-of-32 (21.9 percent) shooting from the field in losses in Games 4 and 5, but he still ended up averaging 25.6 points on 47.7 percent shooting from the field, seven rebounds, 3.4 assists and two steals per game in the series.
The injuries and inconsistent three-point shooting proved too much for the Heat to overcome against the Celtics.
Miami shot just 30 percent from three-point range in the East finals after making an NBA-best 37.9 percent of its threes in the regular season.
As for the long list of injuries, the 32-year-old Butler missed the second half of the Heat’s Game 3 win because of right knee inflammation, which looked to limit him in Games 4 and 5 before getting back on track in the final two games of the series.
Heat guard Tyler Herro, who was named the NBA’s Sixth Man of the Year this season, missed Games 4, 5 and 6 because of a strained left groin. Herro, 22, returned to play in Game 7, but was clearly not even close to 100 percent as he finished Sunday’s loss scoreless and played just seven minutes off the bench.
Heat starting point guard Kyle Lowry, 36, missed eight games this postseason because of a strained left hamstring, including the first two games of the East finals. When Lowry did return against the Celtics, the hamstring still looked to be a lingering issue as he averaged 9.4 points on 14-of-49 (28.6 percent) shooting from the field and 8-of-30 (26.7 percent) shooting on threes and 4.2 assists against the Celtics.
Then there was Heat starting forward P.J. Tucker, who did not miss a game this postseason despite dealing with a strained right calf early in the playoffs and then left knee irritation in the East finals. Tucker, 37, sat for the final 20:28 of Game 7 because of an undisclosed injury.
“I don’t want to speak on behalf of our players. But Tucker, he is a Miami Heat guy,” Spoelstra said. “I would say for the majority of this playoff run, he’s just been willing himself to get out there and do what he does best.
“There’s probably five or six times where the trainers had told me, I don’t think Tuck is going tonight. And I joked about it with you guys all the time. I couldn’t ask him how he was doing and I couldn’t ask the trainers in front of him how he was doing. He just has an incredible will inside of him to overcome anything that he may be feeling.”
There were others on the Heat’s roster also bothered by nagging injuries. The East finals’ relentless every-other-day game schedule made circumstances even tougher for Miami’s ailing players.
The Celtics also dealt with injuries in the conference finals, with starters Marcus Smart playing through a sprained right ankle and Robert Williams playing through left knee soreness.
“I think if this series could have been, if we had a day in between somewhere, or maybe a couple of those gaps, guys could have recovered a bit more,” Spoelstra said following Game 7 on Sunday night. “But both teams were dealing with it.
“We were dealing with quite a few things as well. It’s not an excuse. We got beat. I love the fact that our guys are putting themselves out there. Kyle, whatever minutes he played tonight was way more minutes than he should have played. Same thing for Tyler. Tyler just absolutely made himself available when he really didn’t have any practices. If it was the regular season, there was no chance he would have played.”
Spoelstra went as far as to say that he “was making decisions that I’ve never made in my career” this postseason because of the Heat’s injury issues.
“These last two series, it was a daily meeting with the training staff to get an inventory of where guys were,” Spoelstra continued. “But these guys were so committed to the challenge that they are willing to do whatever it took to get themselves out there and compete and really compete at a high level physically. It just shows you the mental toughness of the guys in the locker room.”
In the end, the Celtics were the better team and the Heat is again left wondering what could have been with a healthier roster for the second time in the last three seasons. The Heat lost the 2020 NBA Finals to the Los Angeles Lakers in six games after starters Bam Adebayo and Goran Dragic went down with injuries in the first game of that championship series.
The Heat now enters the always-uncertain offseason. The only players on the Heat’s roster with guaranteed salaries for next season are Butler, Adebayo, Lowry, Duncan Robinson and Herro.
“It feels heartbreaking,” Spoelstra said. “We just wanted a crack at it. A crack at Golden State, and just find out, you know, as competitors. I love this group. This team was here to compete for a title. In that regard, I think we lived up to those expectations. But we fell short. We’ll never know, and that’s the part that we’ll have to live with.”
This story was originally published May 30, 2022 at 12:11 PM.
