Heat remains at a loss against top five teams in East but loses no ground in playoff race
Five takeaways from the Heat’s 110-105 loss to the Boston Celtics on Monday at TD Garden Center:
▪ The Heat has been competitive in some of its games against the best of the East but continues to come up short.
Monday’s loss dropped Miami to 2-13 against the top five seeds in the East. And the Heat hasn’t beaten any of them since Jan. 21.
Miami is 1-3 against Milwaukee, with a seven-point win in December and losses by margins of 38, 15 and 29 since.
The Heat is 0-3 against Toronto, with losses by 10, 12 and 21.
Miami is 0-2 against Philadelphia, with losses by 10 and 4 and a game next Tuesday in Miami, which will be preceded by a ceremony honoring Dwyane Wade.
The Heat is 0-3 against Indiana, with losses by 8, 7 and 8.
Miami is now 1-2 against Boston, with a 16-point win in January but losses by 8 and five.
“We showed we can compete,” Goran Dragic said.
At least Miami rallied from a 20-4 hole and an eventual 23-point deficit to close to within three with two minutes left, before a Kyrie Irving basket and free throw pushed the margin to six.
“It looked like we were shell shocked in the first six or seven minutes,” coach Erik Spoelstra said. “It took us a while to get into the fight.
Every time we had an opportunity to really get it there, something happened. We could not get it over the hump to close out the game. [But] the guys showed some grit.”
There was good work Monday from Goran Dragic (30 points), Bam Adebayo (19 points, 14 rebounds, two blocks), Dwyane Wade (17 points, 7 assists) and Kelly Olynyk (14 points, 6 rebounds). Olynyk reached the 1700 minute mark, guaranteeing a $1 million bonus.
“Goran was tremendous,” Spoelstra said. “When he really gets that look in his face, it’s more than a competitive will. It’s a will where he almost refuses to let your team lose. He was playing with such desperation, playing big minutes. He was carrying us through that third quarter.”
But Spoelstra was irked when Olynyk was called for a late foul against Irving with the Celtics nursing a three-point lead.
“KO stepped in front of him. By my angle and by a couple of replays I saw, that’s a charge 10 out of 10 times,” Spoelstra said. “I can say this because I’m not complaining. I’m still upset about that charge-block call.”
▪ Nothing much changed in the race for a playoff spot.
With Orlando, Detroit and Brooklyn all losing, Miami ended the night exactly how it started it – in eighth in the East, a half game up on No. 9 Orlando, one half game back of the No. 7 Nets and one game back of No. 6 Detroit.
Orlando lost at Toronto; Detroit lost to Indiana and Brooklyn lost to Milwaukee.
Spoelstra, during his postgame media briefing, said he wasn’t even aware of those results.
Wade and Dragic said they could take some solace in those results, but Dragic said “if we won tonight, we would [have caught]” Detroit and Brooklyn.
▪ The Heat’s depth, once a great strength this season, is now something of a shortcoming, largely because of bad luck.
Not only were Josh Richardson, Justise Winslow and Rodney McGruder back in Miami with injuries, but the Heat lost Derrick Jones Jr. to a right knee injury, which was sustained in a collision with Irving in the first half. Spoelstra had no update on the severity but said Jones will get an MRI on Tuesday.
The injury was to the same knee that was injured earlier this season, forcing Jones to miss eight games.
That left James Johnson in the starting lineup to begin the second half, and left six healthy players on the bench: Dwyane Wade, Hassan Whiteside, Ryan Anderson, Udonis Haslem, Duncan Robinson and Yante Maten.
Johnson said playing small forward wasn’t any adjustment, even though most of his minutes have come at power forward this season.
“I was ready,” Johnson said. “I was happy my name was called” to start the second half.
Miami thinned its rotation at the trade deadline by dealing Tyler Johnson and Wayne Ellington for Ryan Anderson, who has barely played.
The Heat has only 13 players on its roster but hasn’t filled the last two roster spots mostly because A) it has Robinson and Maten (who don’t count toward those 13 because they’re on two-way contracts); B) it doesn’t feel any players signed would play and C) Miami was up right against the luxury tax, though the Heat has downplayed that as an issue.
The luxury tax issue isn’t much of a factor any more because Olynyk reaching his bonus Monday guaranteed the Heat will pay a tax this season.
▪ Miami continues to get off to poor starts recently.
The Heat fell behind 20-4 and 30-8 early, eventually trailing by as many as 23 in the first half. This marked the third consecutive game that the Heat fell behind early, following first-half deficits of 10 points against Dallas and 9 to the Knicks.
The Heat rallied to beat the Mavericks and Knicks but couldn’t overcome the depths of Monday’s deficit against a higher quality opponent.
“For some reason, in this building, we always get off to a slow start,” Wade said. “You can use everything you got to get back and then they got great individual guys to go get a bucket.”
The Heat’s temporary starting unit of Goran Dragic, Dion Waiters, Bam Adebayo, Kelly Olynyk and Derrick Jones Jr. actually had outscored teams by 13 points in 36 total minutes this season entering the game (and shooting 55 percent as a unit) before falling behind 22-4 as a quartet on Monday.
Josh Richardson presumably will return to the lineup, replacing Jones, if/when he can return from a sore heel, which had him in walking boot.
Justise Winslow, who has missed nine games in a row with a thigh bruise, could come off the bench when he returns.
▪ The Heat’s defense is allowing too many three-pointers.
Since the All-Star break, a greater percentage of opponent shots against Miami have been three-pointers than against any other team, and it’s not even close.
Entering Monday, that percentage was 44.5, compared with 40.9 against the Knicks, who are No. 2 on that list.
And since the break, Miami has been allowing 13.4 threes per game, more than any team except Minnesota and Atlanta.
Part of that is the result is the result of the Heat’s philosophy of protecting the paint. Part of that is the team playing more zone than before the All-Star break.
Part of that is the fact Miami has played the past two weeks without two of its top three perimeter defenders (Winslow and McGruder) and for the past two games, without its best perimeter defender (Richardson). But Miami also hasn’t consistently closed quickly enough on opposing shooters.
On Monday, Boston shot 17 for 40 on threes, including five conversions by Irving and four by Marcus Smart.
The Heat, which went just 10 for 37 on threes Monday, is actually shooting threes better than its opponent since the All Star break (36.1 to 35.1). But Miami is still at a deficit because it’s making only 10.8 threes per game since the All-Star break, 16th in the league.
WADE REPORT
Wade’s final game in Boston included an interesting ceremony out of public view.
Before the game, Danny Ainge, the Celtics’ president of basketball operations, presented Wade with a framed picture of Wade during a game in Boston and an actual piece of the court from the 2008 season at TD Garden.
“Thank you for your amazing career and inspiration,” Ainge told him. “We’ve all benefited from it. You’ve been a remarkable player, and we’ve had some good battles. I now forgive you for messing up [Rajon] Rondo’s elbow on that loose ball. But you’ve been fun to watch from the day you came into the NBA, and we’d like to present you with this picture, all your accomplishments and a 2008 piece of the parquet floor from Boston Garden. Thank you very much.”
Ainge was referring to an incident in the 2011 playoffs, when a contentious tie-up between Wade and Rondo resulted in Rondo dislocating his elbow.
Wade thanked Ainge. “This is dope,” Wade said. “Did I score any buckets on that floor?”
“Yeah, you scored a few too many,” Ainge said. “”Good luck to you.”
Wade received loud applause when he entered the game for the first time, with some of those fans standing to acknowledge him.
“We’ve had so many battles in the playoffs but I appreciate the respect they showed me as a player to present me with a piece of the
history of the Celtics,” Wade said at his locker after the game. “That so was so cool and I definitely didn’t expect it at all.
“This is another one of those franchises that helped myself and this organization know what it took to win and get to that next level. We had to beat this organization to get there. So I appreciate them for pushing us. They were big brothers for a long time, and then we were eventually able to match for a little bit. But we’re thankful for what they did from that standpoint.”
This story was originally published April 1, 2019 at 10:49 PM.