Heat returns home with ground to make up in playoff race: ‘We’re better than what we’re showing’
Monday night’s 101-99 win over the 76ers in Philadelphia may have helped erase some of the pain from the Miami Heat’s four-game losing skid that immediately preceded it. But the victory did little to erase the damage that four-game slide had on the Heat’s position in the playoff race.
The Heat dropped from sixth place to seventh place in the Eastern Conference standings during that losing streak and faces the very real possibility of having to qualify for the playoffs through the play-in tournament. The top six seeds in each conference advance directly to the playoffs, while the seventh through 10th-place teams compete in the play-in tournament for the final two playoff seeds in each conference .
In order to erase some of the harm from those four losses, the Heat will need to win the majority of the 20 games it has remaining on its regular-season schedule.
“Nobody likes to lose. I’m losing sleep at night, you know what I mean,” Heat forward and captain Udonis Haslem said to the Miami Herald as he nears the end of his 20th and final NBA season before entering retirement. “This is not the way I wanted my last year to go. But I think definitely for me, nothing has been easy in life and I’ve had to work for everything. It’s just another situation where you got to work, man. For us to get what we want, we got to push a little harder, give a little more and that’s just how it is in life.”
That work will continue when the Heat opens a critical season-long six-game homestand with its second straight matchup against the 76ers on Wednesday (7:30 p.m., Bally Sports Sun).
“I would love to look at the homestand and say let’s take care of business,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said. “But because of our circumstances and everything, that old cliche becomes so true right now. We literally have to take this one game at a time and see if we can build some momentum.”
The positive news for the Heat is it has been good at home with a 19-10 record at Miami-Dade Arena this season, which is the ninth-best home record in the NBA. In fact, Miami is 8-1 in its last nine home games.
The bad news for the Heat is each of the six games during the long homestand come against teams that entered Tuesday with winning records: Wednesday vs. 76ers, Friday vs. New York Knicks, Saturday vs. Atlanta Hawks, Monday vs. Hawks, Wednesday vs. Cleveland Cavaliers and Friday vs. Cavaliers. Four of those games come against top-five teams in the East — the third-place 76ers, fourth-place Cavaliers and fifth-place Knicks.
So, this very important six-game homestand will be far from easy.
“I still think we got the talent, we got what it takes,” Haslem said. “We just got to be able to put it together. We’ve had a lot of missing pieces, guys in and out. We got guys that’s coming in off of waivers and immediately getting into the lineup. There have been a lot of moving parts, but we’re better than what we’re showing and we got a couple more games down the stretch to show it.
“I believe in us. I think we can do it. This league is crazy. You can lose four or five in a row and then go on a winning streak. There’s a lot of parity. If we put it together and go on a little streak and ride it into the playoffs, get hot at the right time, we can make a little run.”
After turning in its most efficient three-point shooting performance in nearly a month in Monday’s win over the 76ers, staying hot from beyond the arc would help the Heat go on a late-season run.
Even after shooting 15 of 37 (40.5 percent) from three-point range in Philadelphia, the Heat still entered Tuesday with the NBA’s third-worst team three-point percentage at 33.3 percent this season. Monday marked the first time Miami has shot better than 40 percent on threes since a Jan. 31 win over the Cleveland Cavaliers and the first time it has hit 15 or more threes in a game since a Dec. 20 loss to the Chicago Bulls.
An engaged and assertive Jimmy Butler also helps the Heat and he has been that since returning from the All-Star break. He led Miami to Monday’s win, finishing just short of his first triple-double of the season with 23 points on 9-of-14 shooting from the field, 11 rebounds, nine assists and four steals in 32 minutes.
Butler has averaged 24.7 points, 5.3 rebounds, 5.3 assists and 1.7 steals per game while shooting an ultra-efficient 23 of 32 (71.9 percent) from the field in three games since the All-Star break. Two of Butler’s top 11 Game Scores for the season, a formula Basketball Reference uses to measure a player’s productivity for a single game, have come in the last two games.
“I don’t operate well in losing spaces. I’m tired of losing like Jimmy,” Haslem said. “We just got to keep fighting, though. We got a locker room full of fighters, we got a locker room full of guys who have built their reputation off hard work and they wouldn’t be here without that. So we got to go back to our roots and what got us here — busting our [butt] and working hard.”
The Heat also has to keep playing elite defense to make a late-season run up the standings because its offense can’t be relied on. Miami entered Tuesday with the NBA’s fifth-best defensive rating but fifth-worst offensive rating this season.
“We can’t keep giving up 35, 40 points in the first quarter of games and think we’re going to come back,” Haslem continued. “That’s not the case. We’re not going to come back from giving up 40 points when we’re almost last in the league in scoring. That dynamic doesn’t work. So we got to defend.”
The Heat’s inconsistent play this season has dug this hole in the standings that it must now try to dig out of over the final 20 games of the regular season. After closing last regular season as the East’s top playoff seed, the goal in the final weeks of this regular season is simply to avoid the play-in tournament.
“We know every game matters,” Heat forward Max Strus said. “Every game is huge in the standings. With 20 games left, we really got to make a good stretch here of wins and just move up as much as we can. Where the dust settles, we’ll figure it out then.”
INJURY REPORT
Heat point guard Kyle Lowry will miss his 10th straight game because of left knee soreness on Wednesday against the 76ers. Lowry has been nearing his return, but the team and Lowry continue to take a cautious approach with the injury.
The Heat also remains without Jamal Cain (G League, two-way contract), Nikola Jovic (G League assignment) and Omer Yurtseven (G League assignment).
With Jovic and Yurtseven expected to join the Heat’s G League affiliate, the Sioux Falls Skyforce, for their G League assignment on Wednesday, it represents another step forward in their recoveries. Jovic has not played with the Heat since late December because of a back injury and Yurtseven has yet to play this season because of ankle surgery.
The Heat also listed Strus (right ankle soreness) as questionable and Kevin Love (left knee hyperextension) as probable.
This story was originally published February 28, 2023 at 11:27 AM.
