Heat learns just how far it is from contending for title in season-ending loss: ‘We were humbled’
If the Miami Heat needed a reminder of just how far it is from contending for an NBA championship, it definitely got one before entering the offseason.
The Heat’s season ended in humiliating fashion, as the Eastern Conference’s top-seeded Cleveland Cavaliers finished off a 4-0 sweep of the East’s eighth-seeded Heat in the first round of the playoffs with an emphatic 138-83 win in Game 4 on Monday night at Kaseya Center.
“We were humbled,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said.
Humbled in a historic way, as the 55-point margin in Game 4 goes down as the fourth-most lopsided playoff game in NBA history.
The Cavaliers outscored the Heat by 122 points in the four games for the most lopsided playoff series in NBA history.
In fact, the Heat’s two worst playoff losses in franchise history came in Games 3 and 4 of this series. After showing some fight during its two losses in Cleveland to begin the first round, the Heat experienced its most lopsided playoff defeat in franchise history in a 37-point loss to the Cavaliers in Saturday’s Game 3 and then reached a new level of bad in Monday’s season-ending 55-point loss.
“They left us behind these last two games,” Spoelstra continued. “I’ll be able to separate this because this is a group that it’s a shame they will be remembered for these two home games here and taking a 4-0 sweep because this group showed a lot of character and resilience.”
But that resilience was nowhere to be found in the final days of the Heat’s season, as it was swept in a best-of-7 playoff series for just the third time in franchise history. The first two occurrences came in the first round against the Chicago Bulls in 2007 and in the first round against the Milwaukee Bucks in 2021.
“This series was humbling,” Spoelstra again emphasized. “These last two games were embarrassing, but Cleveland is also a very good team. We won whatever we won, they won 64 games. We’re as irrational as we usually are, thinking that we have a chance to win this series and they showed us why we weren’t ready for that.”
The Heat was clearly not ready for that and its not surprising, considering Cleveland finished 27 games ahead of Miami in the East standings this regular season. At the end of the regular season, the Cavaliers were in first place in the East at 64-18 and the Heat was in 10th place in the East at 37-45.
The only reason the Heat was even in the playoffs is because it became the first 10th-place team in either conference to make the playoffs from the play-in tournament since this current play-in format was first instituted for the 2020-21 season.
“It was a fun group to be around, especially those last eight weeks of the season while we were just grinding, struggling, grinding, and then playing our best basketball at the end of the season when it mattered,” Spoelstra said. “It was a fun group to be around. I felt fully alive, as alive as I felt in a while in a regular season. It’s a big credit to this group of how connected this group was, how this group was really playing for each other. But it’ll be a story that nobody really cares about because of how it ended.
“I get it, but I feel for the locker room. This group has put a lot into this season and to be able to overcome a lot of things and then to have those two play-in games where most people would say, ‘What’s the big celebration?’ Mediocrity, but it was a lot of fun.”
But so much of this season was not fun for the Heat, as it dealt with Jimmy Butler’s ugly exit and then endured a 10-game losing skid in March on its way to finishing the regular season with a losing record for the first time since the 2018-19 season and just the sixth time in Pat Riley’s 30 seasons with the organization.
“A lot of ups and downs,” Heat captain and three-time All-Star center Bam Adebayo said. “But we fought at the end of the day. So, you’re talking about a 10th seed that made the playoffs. That’s one moral victory we can leave with. But this has got to fuel a lot of us going into the offseason.”
The Heat’s leading duo of Adebayo (13 points on 13 shots) and Herro (four points on 10 shots) combined for just 17 points in Monday’s season-ending loss.
On the other side of the country in San Francisco, Butler helped his new team, the Golden State Warriors, take a 3-1 series lead over the Houston Rockets in the first round of the playoffs. He finished with an impressive stat line of 27 points on 7-of-12 shooting from the field and 12-of-12 shooting from the foul line, five rebounds and six assists on the same night of the Heat’s ugly season-ending loss.
“I got my joy back, as some would say,” Butler said during a postgame interview on TNT on Monday, referring back to the moment that he said he lost his joy with the Heat in early January before the Heat eventually traded him to the Warriors in February.
So much went wrong for the Heat this season after making it to the NBA Finals two times and East finals three times over the previous five seasons with Butler on the roster. So much also went wrong for the Heat in Monday’s one-sided defeat.
“There was no real consistency in our play,” Herro said of this season. “That was kind of the last two or three weeks. We played really well in those two play-in games to get to this point and that’s kind of what led us to think that obviously we didn’t think we would have been swept how bad we got swept. It was very humbling. But back to the drawing board and we’ll figure out things to do.”
The Heat’s moral victory from this season will be the fact that it made it to the playoffs despite all it went through.
“That was something that was hard earned,” Spoelstra said. “Can’t pay for it, can’t get it on Amazon. A group came together and had a bunch of adversity, a bunch of losses. It could have been much easier just to fall apart”
But the Heat has never been about moral victories. The Heat has now lost eight straight home playoff games and has been eliminated in the first round of the playoffs in back-to-back seasons.
The Heat knows it needs to get better. This historically bad first-round sweep served as a clear reminder of that.
“As an organization, yeah, we’re going to look at this and say this is unacceptable,” Spoelstra said. “We got to get to another level.”
