Will Heat be eliminated or clinch playoff spot vs. Bulls? ‘We know the consequences’
The Miami Heat finished just one win from reaching the NBA Finals last season. A year later, the Heat is in danger of finishing one win short of reaching the playoffs.
One of the most frustrating seasons for the franchise in recent history has the Heat one win away from clinching a playoff spot but also one loss away from being eliminated from playoff contention.
With the Chicago Bulls rallying for a road win over the Toronto Raptors on Wednesday night as part of the NBA’s play-in tournament, the Heat hosts the Bulls in a win-or-go-home game on Friday at 7 p.m. to close out the Eastern Conference’s play-in tournament. The game will be televised exclusively on TNT.
The Heat was forced into Friday’s play-in contest by Tuesday’s ugly 116-105 home loss to the Atlanta Hawks.
“If you’re competitor, regardless of the circumstances of how you got to this point, you do want to embrace this,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said following Thursday’s practice at Kaseya Center. “It’s high level competition. I think these kind of environments are fun for the players and we’re coming off of a tough loss the other night. We know the stakes, we know the consequences, all that.”
The winner of Friday’s matchup between the Heat and Bulls will clinch the East’s No. 8 playoff seed and a best-of-7 first-round series against superstar forward Giannis Antetokounmpo and the top-seeded Milwaukee Bucks, which closed with the NBA’s top record at 58-24.
The loser of Friday’s matchup between the Heat and Bulls will be eliminated and miss the playoffs. The last time the Heat missed the playoffs was in the 2018-19 season.
“It’s going to be a desperate game,” Bulls guard Alex Caruso said. “They didn’t play great the last game against Atlanta, who punched them in the mouth early. I think they’ll be a little bit more prepared to fight from the beginning. You know the competitive greatness of Jimmy [Butler] and Kyle [Lowry]. We know they’ll be ready to play. It’s the same mindset for us. Be locked in and do what we do well.”
If this season’s head-to-head results are any indication, the Bulls enter with a big edge against the Heat. Miami went 0-3 against Chicago this season, losing the three games by a combined margin of 32 points.
The teams’ first matchup of the season was the opener when the Heat fell to the Bulls 116-108 on Oct. 19 in Miami. Chicago won this game despite missing star guard Zach LaVine because co-star DeMar DeRozan went off for 37 points. The Heat, which led by as many as nine points in the first half, committed 13 turnovers in the second half.
The teams’ second meeting of the season ended with the Bulls earning a 113-103 win against the Heat on Dec. 20 in Miami. The Heat was missing three important rotation players in that game, with Butler, Lowry and Caleb Martin sitting.
The teams’ third and final game of the season was a few weeks ago, when the Bulls defeated the Heat 113-99 in Chicago on March 18. The Bulls led by as many as 27 points, and Lowry did not play in this contest on the front end of a back-to-back set as part of the team’s maintenance plan for his left knee.
“We match up well against them,” LaVine said when asked about the Heat. “Once again, this is a one-and-done situation. We have to go in with the same mindset. They’re going to make adjustments. We are too.”
But as Heat guard Tyler Herro pointed out, regular-season results sometimes can be misleading. Miami’s 3-1 regular-season edge against Atlanta proved meaningless in Tuesday’s loss to the Hawks.
“I don’t think it translates,” Herro said. “I think we were up 3-1 against Atlanta and that didn’t matter at all. So I don’t think it matters.”
The Bulls are led by LaVine and DeRozan, who combined to average 49.3 points per game in the regular season. They‘re efficient, too, as Lavine shot 48.5 percent from the field and DeRozan shot 50.4 percent from the field.
Bulls center Nikola Vucevic is the Bulls’ third-leading scorer with 17.6 points per game in the regular season.
Despite those skilled scorers, Chicago’s winning formula is not built around its offense. The Bulls closed the regular season with the NBA’s 24th-ranked offensive rating.
Instead, Chicago wins games behind elite defense. The Bulls posted the league’s best defensive rating after the All-Star break on the way to finishing the regular season with the fifth-best defense.
“I think one of the most underrated aspects of what they’ve done this season is built a very stable top-of-the-league-type defense,” Spoelstra said. “Since All-Star break, they have the No. 1 defense. But season long, they have the fifth-ranked defense. It’s a marked improvement from last season. Then, obviously, if you have a defense like that and you have two great professional scorers [LaVine and DeRozan] that can put a lot of pressure on any kind of scheme that you have, that always gives them a chance regardless of whether they’re home or away.”
With defensive-minded guards Patrick Beverley and Caruso in the starting lineup alongside DeRozan, LaVine and Vucevic, the Bulls recorded the NBA’s sixth-highest opponent turnover rate (percentage of opponent possessions that end in a turnover) in the regular season.
“We got to take care of the ball,” Herro said. “Obviously, any time we turn the ball over, it’s a problem going down the other way. They’re long and they got two guys on defense [Beverley and Caruso] that really get into the ball. And obviously, they speed you up, they get deflections and that’s how they get their turnovers.
“A lot of times, they bring in third or fourth defenders into the paint and they’re long and they get deflections. So that’s how their defense is so good. But we made some adjustments today in practice and we’ll be alright.”
Among the other storylines surrounding Friday’s Heat-Bulls matchup:
▪ Lowry and DeRozan spent six seasons as Toronto Raptors teammates.
▪ Butler spent the first six seasons of his NBA career with the Bulls, which traded Butler to the Minnesota Timberwolves in June 2017 for a package that included LaVine.
▪ Bulls coach Billy Donovan was Heat forward Udonis Haslem’s college coach at the University of Florida.
▪ This isn’t where the Heat expected to be after entering last season’s playoffs as the East’s top seed on the way to the conference finals. But this is the Heat’s reality.
“We put ourselves in this position,” Herro said. “Like Spo said, we’ll do it the hard way. This is a one-game series starting tomorrow. We got to win and hopefully we can get the eighth seed.”
