Heat captain Bam Adebayo looks back on rough season and looks ahead at important offseason
Miami Heat center Bam Adebayo has still never won an NBA championship, but the three-time All-Star has done plenty of winning during his career. In fact, Adebayo and Boston Celtics forward Jayson Tatum are the only players in the league currently younger than 28 years old who have already appeared in at least 78 playoff games.
But following the Heat’s midseason trade of Jimmy Butler in February, Adebayo came away from his eighth NBA season with a better appreciation of how difficult it is to win games after the Heat’s ugly early first-round playoff exit. The Eastern Conference’s top-seeded Cleveland Cavaliers swept the East’s eighth-seeded Heat in the first round, 4-0, with the Cavaliers winning the four games by a total of 122 points to make it the most lopsided playoff series in NBA history.
“Really understanding how hard it is to win a playoff game,” Adebayo, 27, said last week when asked what he took away from the Heat’s first-round playoff nightmare. “... To understand how hard it is to win. I feel like a lot of us take it for granted, when we’re out there and kind of beating a team you’re supposed to beat. Then you get in the playoffs and it’s an even playing field, and you got to really work through it. So I think just valuing winning.”
Life without Butler proved to be difficult for Adebayo and the Heat.
After trading the disgruntled Butler to the Golden State Warriors on Feb. 6, the Heat closed the regular season with a poor 12-21 record following the move that brought Andrew Wiggins, Davion Mitchell, Kyle Anderson and the 2025 Warriors first-round pick (No. 20 overall) to the Heat.
That was enough to sink the Heat to an underwhelming regular-season record of 37-45 for a 10th-place finish in the East. Miami closed the regular season with a losing record for first time since the 2018-19 season and just the sixth time in Heat president Pat Riley’s 30 seasons with the organization before being eliminated in the first round of the playoffs for the second straight season.
“This organization and this team could have let go of the rope a long time ago, going through what we went through this season,” Adebayo said. “A lot of people would have just chalked it up and gone like, ‘You know what, we’re just going to start over.’ That’s one thing I love about this organization is that we’re always trying to win no matter what, no matter what situation we’re in.
“We went through two play-in games on the road trying to just get to the dance. So I would say it’s been an up and down road and we’ve figured out how hard it is to win.”
What the Heat went through was Butler’s contentious exit from the Heat, as Butler requested a trade from Miami before being suspended by the team three times during the span of a month and eventually getting traded to Golden State.
That turbulent stretch tested the leadership of Adebayo, who just completed his second season as the Heat’s captain. Heat coaches and players believe Adebayo passed that test despite the rough results.
“I love seeing Bam’s leadership feet be put to the fire, and that’s what it was,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said last week. “He’s accepted the captainship, for sure. But it’s one thing to do that when things are going well and you’re playing well. At the beginning of the year, we weren’t playing well and he wasn’t playing his best basketball. Yet, he was still rolling up his sleeves and leading. I thought that was a big step for him.
“There’s a lot of guys in this league who wouldn’t do that and would have complained and pointed fingers and all of that. And then he did the same thing when everybody was looking for somebody in the locker room in March [during the Heat’s 10-game losing streak]. That’s when he was the strongest and I think that’s when he was playing his best, as well. That speaks to his character. We’ll need a whole lot more of it going forward. I learned a lot going through this experience, Bam learned a lot and I think he’s going to be better for it.”
How does Adebayo believe he handled the Butler drama as the Heat’s captain?
“Man, I would say I handled it as professionally as possible,” said Adebayo, who averaged 18.1 points, 9.6 rebounds, 4.3 assists and 1.3 steals per game this season. “And my teammates know that, but also I tried to handle it where I banked so much equity with every last one of them that I can have personal conversations with them and let them know that some of this we’re going through, it’s just because we have to go through it. But them also understanding that we are expected to play, we are expected to win. If we don’t win, figure out how we can win. I feel like they handled that in the best way that they could.”
But while the Heat is one week into its offseason, Butler is in the second round of the playoffs with the Warriors. Butler averaged 18.3 points, six rebounds, 4.8 assists and 1.3 steals per game during Golden State’s first-round playoff series victory against the Houston Rockets.
“Yeah, there were [concerns about Butler],” Warriors owner Joe Lacob admitted to The Athletic after getting past the Rockets in the first round of the playoffs. “But you do your analysis, you make your choices, and, yeah, it was a little bit of a risk. But we’ve got to take risks in this life. And he’s worth every freaking penny. That’s all I can say. He’s fantastic.”
Meanwhile, the Heat enters an offseason that could bring a lot of change to its roster after a disappointing season. Adebayo accepts whatever needs to be done, as long as it helps the Heat win more games.
“At the end of the day, I want to win,” said Adebayo, who is under contract with the Heat through the 2028-29 season. “So I can’t really go into the tweaks and everything. I feel like that’s more of a Pat Riley question. .... But for me, he knows my mentality. He knows I want to win. We want to be in the best way possible to do that.”
This story was originally published May 6, 2025 at 10:21 AM.
