What went wrong vs. Hawks and what needs to be better Friday for Heat to keep season alive
The Miami Heat knows what it needs to do to keep its season alive.
“We got to play, like legit, the exact opposite of how we played today,” star Jimmy Butler said after the Heat’s ugly 116-105 play-in tournament loss to the Atlanta Hawks on Tuesday night at Kaseya Center.
The Heat started slow and trailed by as many as 24 points in the first half, as the Hawks held on for the win behind a huge 22-6 edge in offensive rebounds that led to a 26-6 advantage in second-chance points. The Heat’s leading duo of Bam Adebayo and Butler combined for 33 inefficient points on 11-of-31 (35.5 percent) shooting from the field in the loss.
“They beat the hell out of us on the glass,” Heat guard Tyler Herro said. “It wasn’t even close. So we can point fingers, do whatever. At the end of the day, they beat the hell out of us on the boards and that’s what it is.”
The good news for the Heat is it entered the play-in tournament with two chances to win one game to earn a playoff spot.
The bad news for the Heat is it now stands just one loss from missing the playoffs for the first time since the 2018-19 season. Miami will host a win-or-go-home game on Friday at 7 p.m. televised on TNT against the winner of Wednesday night’s No. 9 vs. No. 10 play-in matchup between the Toronto Raptors and Chicago Bulls.
Even if the Heat wins Friday to qualify for the playoffs, its reward would be the Eastern Conference’s No. 8 playoff seed and a first-round series against superstar forward Giannis Antetokounmpo and the top-seeded Milwaukee Bucks that closed with the NBA’s top record at 58-24. Game 1 of that series would be Sunday at 5:30 p.m. at Fiserv Forum and will be televised by TNT and Bally Sports Sun.
The loser of Friday’s play-in game between the Heat and the winner of Raptors-Bulls misses the playoffs entirely.
“At least we have a lot of experience,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said when asked about regrouping from Tuesday’s disappointing loss to prepare for Friday’s high-stakes game. “We’ve had a lot of ups and downs this season. Nothing about this season has been easy, so we’re going to do this the hard way. We’re going to get back to work [Wednesday], regroup, put our arms around each other, get to the film and get better from this.”
The rebounding will certainly need to be better on Friday regardless of the opponent. The Heat posted its sixth-worst single-game rebounding percentage (the percentage of available rebounds a team grabs) of the season in Tuesday’s loss to the Hawks at 42.5 percent, and it’s 1-5 in those games.
Seventeen of the Hawks’ 22 offensive rebounds came on missed three-pointers.
“It was at one point like a comedy of errors,” Spoelstra said. “Deflections, missed balls through our hands. Even when we had block outs with two guys there, they ended up with the ball.”
But Adebayo and Butler will also need to be better Friday for the Heat to make the playoffs.
Adebayo averaged 20.4 points per game on 54 percent shooting from the field in the regular season. He closed Tuesday’s loss with 12 points on 5-of-12 (41.7 percent) shooting from the field.
Butler averaged 25.6 points per game on an ultra-efficient 61.6 percent shooting from the field in his final 20 games of the regular season. He finished Tuesday’s loss with 21 points on 6-of-19 (31.6 percent) shooting from the field. It represented Butler’s least efficient shooting performance from the field in more than three months since totaling just nine points on 2-of-8 shooting from the field in a Jan. 2 win over the Los Angeles Clippers
When asked about the Hawks sending multiple defenders his way to take away some of his paint opportunities and also make the paint shots he did take tougher than usual, Adebayo said: “We just got to figure out a way to get me the ball. Other than that, some of the guys had it going. But we have to figure out how we can keep them going and also get me the ball.”
Adebayo and Butler combined to finish just 9 of 26 (34.6 percent) from inside the paint in Tuesday’s play-in defeat. The Heat fell to 0-4 this season when Adebayo and Butler both shoot worse than 45 percent from the field in a game.
“We had shots that were at the rim that they challenged at the rim,” Spoelstra said. “Some of them were makeable shots, we missed a lot of those.”
What now? The Heat gathered Wednesday at Kaseya Center to watch film of Tuesday’s loss and is expected to return to the practice court on Thursday.
But the bottom line is the Heat must find a way to move past Tuesday’s result and get a win Friday or else its season will be over by the end of the week.
“We know why we lost,” Butler said. “It’s easily correctable. But you got to want to do it. You got to put bodies on bodies, you got to jump up and grab the ball and not foul. Play a little bit harder, play a lot harder actually and come out with a win on Friday.”
