Heat still searching for answers late in season, as play-in tournament possibility looms
The Miami Heat spent the final weeks of its regular season last year trying to lock up the Eastern Conference’s top playoff seed. The Heat accomplished that mission.
The final weeks of the Heat’s regular season this year will be spent trying to avoid the play-in tournament as it continues to deal with inexplicable ups and downs. Whether the Heat can pull that off is still to be determined.
A lot has changed in 12 months.
“I do believe that there just has to be a mind-set shift to be able to sustain a game that can win night in and night out,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said. “We’ve shown that we can be the very best against anybody anywhere, and then we’ve also shown this.”
This was a 119-96 blowout loss to a Philadelphia 76ers team missing All-Star center Joel Embiid on Wednesday night to open a critical six-game homestand. As the Heat looks to make a late-season run up the standings and avoid having to qualify for the playoffs through the play-in tournament, it suffered its most lopsided home loss of the season to a short-handed team that was without its best player.
This defeat came two nights after the Heat earned a quality two-point win against this same 76ers team in Philadelphia with Embiid playing Monday.
“We haven’t had many of these kind of losses,” Spoelstra said, with the Heat hoping to bounce back in another very important game at Miami-Dade Arena on Friday (8 p.m., Bally Sports Sun) against the streaking New York Knicks who have won seven games in a row. “But it’s a sustainability that we have not been able to wrap our hands around this season, and that’s what why we’re going to continue to work at it until we do. All the answers that we want are in that locker room.”
The Heat needs those answers to make an appearance fast, as it currently stands in play-in tournament territory in seventh place in the Eastern Conference standings at 33-30 with only 19 games remaining on its regular-season schedule.
Miami is 1.5 games behind the sixth-place Brooklyn Nets and 3.5 games behind the fifth-place Knicks. The Heat is also just 1.5 games ahead of the eighth-place Atlanta Hawks and two games ahead of the ninth-place Toronto Raptors.
In a way, Miami has control over its own fate: The Heat has three games remaining against the Knicks, including Friday’s matchup. The Heat also has one game left to play against the Nets, two games left to play against the Hawks and one game left to play against the Raptors.
To make the playoffs without needing to go through the play-in tournament, the Heat needs to finish the regular season as a top-six seed in the East. The play-in tourney, which is done during the weeklong window between the end of the regular season and the start of the playoffs, is structured to have the seventh through 10th-place teams competing for the final two playoff seeds in each conference.
Through statistical analysis, FiveThirtyEight still projects the Heat to finish the regular season as the sixth seed in the East with a 43-39 record to narrowly avoid the play-in tournament and open the playoffs against the third seed, which is currently the 76ers. Miami would need to close the regular season with a 10-9 record in its remaining games to finish with 43 wins like FiveThirtyEight predicts.
“You can’t really explain it,” center Bam Adebayo said when asked to explain the Heat’s inconsistent play this season. “It’s an up-and-down season, as you can see. It’s been up and down this whole season. You can’t really explain that. It’s more so we have to find that right niche for us and we haven’t found it yet.”
The Heat’s offense has been the biggest force weighing down the team this season
After closing last regular season with the NBA’s 12th-ranked offensive rating (scoring 113 points per 100 possessions) and the league’s top team three-point shooting percentage (37.9 percent) last season, the Heat entered Thursday with the NBA’s 26th-ranked offensive rating (scoring 110.5 points per 100 possessions) and as the league’s third-worst three-point shooting team (33.2 percent) this season.
With Wednesday’s 7-of-29 (24.1 percent) display from beyond the arc, the Heat has shot worse than 30 percent from three-point range in three of its past five games.
“It’s just missed shots,” Adebayo said. “We’re human. And it’s our job to come in here and make sure we make shots, and we didn’t make shots [Wednesday].”
Wednesday also marked the Heat’s second loss in four games to a team playing without its best player. Miami fell to the Bucks by 29 points in Milwaukee on Friday after superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo exited the game for the Bucks in the first quarter and then lost to the 76ers by 23 points in Miami on Wednesday with Embiid unavailable for the 76ers because of left foot soreness.”
“It’s very unlike us, and I wouldn’t necessarily say there’s an exhale,” Spoelstra said of losing to short-handed teams this season, “but we have not seized those opportunities the way we should have so far.”
Time is running out for the Heat to find solutions to its problems, as it has dropped five of its last six games and is 1-3 since the All-Star break.
With five games left on what will likely become a season-defining six-game homestand, the Heat knows the narrative could change fast if it can string together a few victories. Or things could just get worse if the homestand ends with more losses than wins.
“I feel like this homestand, we run off these games, I feel like it’s a different look, different energy,” Adebayo said. “The media would start liking us again. So it’s a big five games for us. So let that game go that we just had, focus on the next five and take it game by game.”
This story was originally published March 2, 2023 at 10:16 AM.
