Heat reaches Christmas below .500 with a new injury to monitor: ‘That’s been our season’
The Miami Heat’s time above .500 was short-lived. The positive injury news didn’t last long either.
After moving above .500 for the first time this season last Saturday, the Heat (16-17) has opened a four-game homestand with two straight losses to fall back below .500 a week later. The latest setback was a 111-108 loss to the Indiana Pacers on Friday night at FTX Arena, as Pacers star guard Tyrese Haliburton capped off a career-best 43-point performance by hitting a game-winning three-pointer with 4.3 seconds to play.
To make matters worse, a night that began with renewed hope that the worst of the Heat’s injury issues were in the past ended with uncertainty surrounding star Jimmy Butler’s status because of a sprained right ankle. After the Heat entered Friday’s game with just two players (Dewayne Dedmon and Omer Yurtseven) out because of injuries, Butler turned his right ankle in the first quarter of the loss.
Butler was able to play through the pain for the next few quarters. But the Heat opted to sit him for the entire fourth quarter, with Butler noting that his “body cooled down” as the game went on and the ankle tightened up.
“I feel like that’s been our season. We’ve been up and down,” guard Kyle Lowry said, with the Heat now in the middle of a two-day Christmas break before continuing its homestand on Monday against the Minnesota Timberwolves. “But we just got to stay level headed no matter what. You can’t get too high, you can’t get too low. You just got to stay the course and stay the path.”
For Butler, he just wants to stay on the court. He has already missed 12 of the Heat’s first 33 games this season — two because of left hip tightness, seven because of right knee soreness, two because of right knee injury management and Tuesday’s home loss to the Chicago Bulls with a stomach illness.
“My luck is not the greatest right now,” Butler, 33, said. “So you got to take it in stride, man. It’s part of this game, part of this league. But I’ll be back.”
The Heat now waits to see how Butler’s ankle responds to treatment over the weekend before making a ruling on his status for Monday’s contest. He missed seven games last season with a sprained right ankle — a three-game absence in November 2021, a three-game absence in January and a one-game absence in March.
The Heat’s injury report for Monday’s game against the Timberwolves will be released Sunday afternoon. There’s some cautious optimism around Butler that he won’t have to miss much time, if any at all, because of his sprained ankle.
“We’ll have a better idea the next couple days,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said regarding Butler’s status. “But he did [sprain the ankle] in the first quarter. You could see he was able to still be in a little bit of a rhythm and flow in the second quarter. But it tightened up at halftime and he wasn’t moving great in the third quarter. Then we all just made the decision, let’s be smart about this and then we’ll evaluate him [Saturday].”
Butler finished Friday’s loss with 20 points on 6-of-11 shooting from the field and 7-of-8 shooting from the foul line, six rebounds, three assists and two steals in 28 minutes before exiting the game with 1:19 left in the third quarter and never returning. He’s averaging 21.8 points while shooting a career-best 52.9 percent from the field to go with 6.8 rebounds, 5.8 assists and 1.9 steals per game this season.
When asked about the Heat’s preferred starting lineup of Lowry, Tyler Herro, Butler, Caleb Martin and Bam Adebayo being available for just 12 of the first 33 games of the season, Butler blamed himself for that low number even though Lowry, Herro, Martin and Adebayo have also all already missed games because of injuries.
“Man, that’s on me,” said Butler, who is under contract with the Heat through the 2025-26 season when he’ll be 36 years old. “You know what I’m saying, it’s tough whenever I’m in and out of the lineup so much. I don’t choose to do that, obviously. But at this point, it’s frustrating. I can only imagine how my teammates feel, how my coaches feel, coach Pat [Riley] and them feel. But I want to be out there, honestly, because I think that I can help, I know that I can help and I will get this thing right and be ready to string together some wins.”
Butler is already scheduled to miss one of the games during the Heat’s final back-to-back of this month — Dec. 30 at Denver Nuggets or Dec. 31 at Utah Jazz — as part of the team’s injury management plan following his recent return from a sore right knee.
Will Butler be less likely to take rest days during the second half of the schedule because he has already missed so much time?
“I don’t know, honestly,” he said when asked that question. “I don’t know what the future holds, I don’t.”
The Heat began Saturday in ninth place in the Eastern Conference and reached Christmas below .500 after finishing last season just one win short of getting to the NBA Finals. Injuries have played a big part in that regression, as Miami entered Saturday with the second-most missed games in the NBA (124 missed games) this season, according to Spotrac.
The Heat is ranked in the top 10 in defense, but entered the weekend with the NBA’s fifth-worst offensive rating this season.
“Not really frustrated,” Adebayo said when asked about the Heat’s injuries. “It’s just more like a thought in your mind like, what if? I wouldn’t say frustrated so much. I mean, it’s frustrating that we lost that way. But you can’t help if a guy gets injured. You can’t help what goes on between the lines.”
For Butler, it’s not about the “what ifs.”
Butler feels like he knows what the Heat can be when it’s whole. It just hasn’t been whole in a while and it remains to be seen if it will be whole again anytime soon after Butler sprained his ankle on Friday.
“I don’t live in ifs. I know what we can be,” Butler said. “We just got to go out there and hoop. Even when guys are out of the lineup, we always got an opportunity but we come up short because we make mistakes, whether it be on the offensive or defensive end. I’m not placing blame on anybody. It’s a collective group.”
SPOELSTRA EXPLAINS DECISION
Coming out of a timeout in need of a defensive stop with the game tied at 108 with 14 seconds to play, Spoelstra did not sub in Martin on the Pacers’ final possession. Haliburton went on to hit a game-winning three with the help of a miscommunication between Herro and Lowry on a switch.
Why didn’t Spoelstra put Martin in the game as one of the Heat’s top individual defenders? It’s worth noting that Martin played just 19 minutes in his first game back after missing the previous two games with a sprained left ankle, and he was subbed out of Friday’s loss with 4:39 left in the third quarter and did not play again.
“Caleb at that point, everybody felt that he had cooled off that much that he wouldn’t be able to go in at that point,” Spoelstra said. “But I was encouraged that he was able to even do what he was able to do. He was an absolute game-time decision to be able to play. That’s why we all love that guy so much. If it was an ideal world, he probably would have waited until [Dec. 26] to play.”
