With opponents adjusting to slow uptempo attack, Heat searching for answers: ‘We’ll find a counter’
The 82-game NBA regular season is long. Sometimes the injury bug hits a team and sometimes a team just runs into a challenging part of its schedule.
Both apply to the Heat at the moment, with injuries and an exhausting stretch in its schedule coinciding with its worst stretch of the season yet. It also coincided with the Heat’s worst loss of the season, falling to the struggling Sacramento Kings 127-111 on Saturday night at Kaseya Center on the back end of a back-to-back set and its third game in four days while playing without starting guards Tyler Herro and Davion Mitchell.
The Heat (14-10) has now lost three straight games for the first time this season, and three of its last four games after a strong 13-6 start to the season.
“It was not one of our finer games, but we’ll regroup,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said following Saturday’s ugly home loss to the Kings ahead of a two-day break before resuming its schedule on Tuesday with an NBA Cup quarterfinal game against the Magic in Orlando: “I want our guys to get as much rest as possible. We have a practice day [Monday], which is good. I think we do need to get back in the gym and just fine-tune some things and get ready for Tuesday.”
One thing the Heat definitely needs to rediscover is its fast-pace attack that was a revelation to begin the season after finishing as one of the five slowest-pace teams in the NBA in each of the past six regular seasons.
The Heat, which still entered Sunday playing at the fastest pace in the NBA (105.4 possessions per 48 minutes) this season, has been slowed recently. Not only was Saturday’s loss to the Kings played at a pace of 100.5 possessions per 48 minutes for the Heat’s third-slowest game of the season, but five of Miami’s six slowest-paced games this season have come in the last seven games.
“We knew this was going to happen,” Heat guard Norman Powell said. “We kind of surprised everybody with the pace, and now they’re ready for it.”
With more film available on the Heat’s revamped uptempo offense that features the fewest screens and handoffs in the league, opponents have made adjustments to try to slow things down.
Whether its opponents using more zone, full-court press or simply denying the Heat’s primary options to force others to do more, the Heat’s offense has slowed to a pace of 100.1 possessions per 48 minutes during its current three-game skid that would rank 22nd in the NBA among teams for the season. Miami’s fast-break points are also down from its season average of 18.4 per game to 11 transition points per game during this three-game losing streak.
“If you develop an identity after 20 games, the league scouts you. So they’ll put together a game plan,” Spoelstra said. “But if you’re doing something well, then you have to put more effort, more intention, more detail in doing it, and that’s what the really good teams figure out. You don’t let teams take you out of what you need to do. That’s why the practice day [on Monday] will be important.”
Powell believes “it’s on us to play a little smarter, knowing that they’re going to be denying and making it tough from our first actions.”
“When I’m not playing with Tyler [Herro], they’re really keying in on us,” Powell said. “So it’s making other guys have to make plays. But I think they’ve been keying in on denying our reversals and things like that, and now we’ve got to get to making second and third movements from the denials, back cutting, sacrificing ourselves to open up driving lanes and things like that for the guys that have the ball.”
Heat captain and three-time All-Star center Bam Adebayo has noticed the adjustments from opponents, too.
“This is the most I’ve seen teams go zone against us,” Adebayo said. “And then obviously when they make a shot, they’re trying to press up so we can’t run in transition. So those two things. But we have one of the best coaches in the league. We’ll find a counter at some point. We’ll find a counter and get back to having this fast pace and playing with this type of energy.”
The results have not been good for the Heat when things slow down, as it is 2-5 this season when the pace is at 102 possessions per 48 minutes or slower.
“Probably my biggest takeaway right now is can we win some games where it’s not at our identity,” Spoelstra said. “We’ll work on it Monday. We’re going to work on getting more consistent to how we want to play, but this is the NBA. It’s not always going to go exactly how you want it to go, and competition has something to say about it. But the mental toughness that great teams figure out is you just figure out a way to win. You figure out what the feel for a game is. And it might have to be an ugly win, and we’ll get there on that as well.”
Even with this recent slowdown, the Heat still enters Sunday with the NBA’s 13th-ranked offensive rating. That’s a big improvement after Miami finished each of the last three seasons with one of the NBA’s 10 worst offensive ratings.
The goal in Monday’s practice is to find ways to get back up to speed — the speed that has led to this early-season offensive improvement. Of course, some rest days and getting Herro and Mitchell back from injury would help.
“Just tightening up the little things and how we want to play, the flow and the play style that we want to get back to and that we’ve been having throughout the course of the year so far,” Powell said of the goal in Monday’s practice. “We’re going to tighten some things up, take [Sunday] off, let our bodies rest and recover. Come back Monday, watch some film, see how we can get better and then get ready for Orlando again.”
