Where Heat stands in playoff race and what makes upcoming week of games so important
The Miami Heat has struggled against the NBA’s top teams this season and those struggles have the Heat in play-in tournament territory for the second straight season.
That trend continued during the Heat’s winless two-game trip that included back-to-back losses to two winning teams — a 114-108 loss to the Mavericks in Dallas on Thursday night and a 107-100 loss to the Thunder in Oklahoma City on Friday night. It marks the first time the Heat has lost two games in a row since the final week of January.
“I mean this is competition and we’re going to work together until we get this breakthrough,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said. “These are painful moments. We had an opportunity in both games.”
Those losses dropped the Heat to 14-20 this season in games against teams that entered Saturday with a winning record. The Heat is also just 1-6 against the four teams (Boston Celtics, Thunder, Denver Nuggets and New Orleans Pelicans) with both a top-10 offensive rating and top-10 defensive rating this season.
But the good news for the Heat is it has reached a soft spot in its late-season schedule as it works to avoid the play-in tournament, with three of its next four games coming against teams that hold the bottom two records in the NBA this season. It begins Sunday against the struggling Washington Wizards at Kaseya Center (6 p.m., Bally Sports Sun).
The Wizards enter with the NBA’s worst record at 10-53 and had lost 16 straight games before defeating the Charlotte Hornets on Friday.
The other two such games during this four-game stretch come against the Pistons on March 15 and March 17 during a weekend stay in Detroit. The Pistons entered Saturday with the NBA’s second-worst record at 10-52.
“Like every other game, with a sense of urgency,” Heat center Bam Adebayo said when asked how the team approaches these types of games. “So for us, it’s just having that same sense of urgency as if we were playing anybody else.”
Heat forward Caleb Martin added: “These are some of the toughest games.”
While running into issues against the NBA’s best, the Heat has taken care of business against inferior opponents this season. Miami is 21-8 this season in games against teams currently with a losing record.
It’s important for the Heat that its success against weaker opponents continues in the coming days as part of a tight playoff race in the Eastern Conference. The Heat (35-28) entered Saturday in sixth place in the East, just two games behind the fourth-place New York Knicks but also just one-half game ahead of the eighth-place Indiana Pacers.
With only 19 games (11 home games and eight road games) left to play in the regular season, the Heat can realistically finish as high as fourth place in the East to clinch home-court advantage in the first round of the playoffs or fall as far as eighth and need to qualify for the playoffs through the play-in tournament for the second straight season.
Earning a top-six playoff seed is the most important item on the Heat’s to-do list because it would keep Miami out of the play-in tourney, which features the seventh-through-10th-place teams competing for the final two playoff seeds in each conference.
According to Basketball Reference’s playoff probabilities report, the Heat entered Saturday with a 51.9 percent chance of finishing at No. 6 or better in the East to make the playoffs while avoiding the play-in tournament. That model has the Heat with no chance to close the regular season as the No. 1 seed, 0.2 percent for a No. 2 finish, 2.6 percent for No. 3, 9.4 percent for No. 4, 15.3 percent for No. 5 and 24.5 percent for No. 6.
One of the biggest factors working in the Heat’s favor is its remaining schedule. Miami entered Saturday with second-easiest remaining schedule, according to Tankathon.com, based solely on the current combined winning percentage of teams left to play.
A large part of that schedule advantage are four remaining games against the Wizards and Pistons, making this stretch important for the Heat to seize on. While three of those games come over the next week, the Heat also travels to face the Wizards on March 31.
Outside of those four games, 10 of the Heat’s 15 other regular-season games left to play come against teams currently with winning records.
In fact, the one game sandwiched between these three matchups against the Wizards and Pistons over the next week will be one of the Heat’s toughest games of the season. The Heat hosts the Nuggets on Wednesday in a rematch of last season’s NBA Finals.
That matchup against the Nuggets will be the one that receives the hype, but the Heat is not in a position to overlook upcoming games against the Wizards and Pistons.
“There’s still time,” Heat star Jimmy Butler said when speaking about areas that the team must improve in. “But damn, not too much time.”
This story was originally published March 9, 2024 at 10:50 AM.
