The Heat completed their back-to-back set in Utah and Phoenix with a pair of wins, as Bam Adebayo stepped up as a jump shooter on both nights, and the youngsters took over the fourth quarter against the Suns. It was the back end of their five-game road trip that lasted seven nights (2-3), and there are multiple things they can build on. 

 

 The Heat’s offensive rebounding, repeated trips to the charity line, plus Adebayo’s jump shooting, and Norman Powell’s rim pressure gave them an 11-point advantage going into the second quarter.

 

Yet the Suns tied it up five minutes later as they blasted the lane while the Heat briefly went cold. The latter eventually rediscovered their mojo and went into halftime up 10 and later experienced more turbulence in the third quarter. 

 

Jaime Jaquez Jr. subsequently sullied schemes with five pull-up jumpers and drive-bys in the fourth, while Pelle Larsson was immaculate on three close-range attempts. The other edge was contesting cleanly on most of Phoenix’s late 3-pointers. 

 

The Heat won 111-102. Jaquez said he is ready to go home to Miami, and that the team is “done talking about it, we just need to go do it,” regarding the upcoming stretch of games.

 

Coach Erik Spoelstra wasn’t planning on playing him all of the fourth quarter, but Jaquez kept “generating so many good things” while Phoenix was going small, with Royce O’Neale at center.  

 

Four of the next five are in Miami. The other outing includes the make-up game the Heat have to play with the Bulls in Chicago, which was originally scheduled for Jan. 8. 

 

Takeaways:

 

• Andrew Wiggins, Kasparas Jakučionis and Adebayo combined for 11 of the team’s 18 offensive rebounds. Keep in mind that the Heat set their season high in offensive rebounds on Saturday in Utah (26), and then had 18 in Phoenix, tying for the fourth-most this year. Furthermore, the Heat are athletic enough to be a huge factor on the offensive glass every night. When they hear Spoelstra telling them to impose their will, it can’t always be on rim attacks or side-to-side passes that expose the arc. The Heat can be in almost any game by hitting the boards this hard. 

 

• Devin Booker and Jalen Green were absent, affecting the Suns’ playmaking and three-level scoring. One thing they can do very well is force over-help away from the arc. Still, the late protection is another area the Heat need to follow up on, because lately they’ve allowed way too many open to wide-open looks this season. Teams must be surrendering at least 10 points per game from shading away from the 3-point line, biting on pump fakes and lunging at shooters. Considering how undisciplined most of the league is, the Heat can have a serious edge by committing to being the best team in this department.

 

• Adebayo has picked up his scoring in January and it’s helping give the team direction. Don’t forget he went nearly a month without scoring at least 20 points and now has done it seven times in his last eight nights. He’s shot 43.9% over that span, but it doesn’t matter. An aggressive Adebayo makes a lot of good things happen and inspires the troops.

 

• Jaquez had 20 points and made 72.7% of his attempts, tying for his fifth-most accurate night of the year. His role as the second-unit leader is one of the three most important on the team because they need him to sustain their preferred pace.

Plans were scrapped after game two.

 

The Heat were snake-bitten by Shaquille O’Neal’s sprained right ankle on Nov. 3 against the Pacers, and his absence put tremendous stress on the players and coaches while the vibes spiraled.

 

“An idle Shaquille can be a challenge for a team,” The Associated Press’ Tim Reynolds told Five Reasons Sports. “While he was resting the ankle, he was still very loud, still very vocal, and not everybody always appreciated or understood Shaq’s sense of humor.”

 

He could have worked harder during his rehab, but he didn’t. They went 9-9 before he returned, but coach Stan Van Gundy voluntarily stepped down from his post on Dec. 12. It wasn’t the first time he had tried resigning that season, either, according to Reynolds. Van Gundy said he wanted to spend more time with his family, but there was an element of him being sick of the drama.

 

O’Neal’s ego and insolence were difficult to handle, and he didn’t exactly view Van Gundy as his “white father,” like he did with coach Phil Jackson in Los Angeles. 

 

So, Riley, the team president who had no interest in a coaching comeback and wanted to finally get on with hip replacement surgery, took over. Yet, it wasn’t smooth sailing from there.

 

They only had a 30-20 record before hosting the Pistons on Feb. 12, 2006. They were coming off a 36-point smackdown in Dallas three days earlier, and the Pistons had defeated them three straight times. Detroit  subsequently had a 13-point lead going into the final frame against the Heat, but the hosts pulled it off thanks to Dwyane Wade and O’Neal combining for 27 points in the fourth quarter. Gary Payton was the only other Miami player to log at least three field goals, and Riley called it a “watershed” moment as the team evolved mentally.

 

Toughness was in part developed by how rigorous the training was. Riley once had the team doing wall-sit exercises while pacing and giving his lecture, according to James Posey in his interview with Heat TV host and radio play-by-play man Jason Jackson. Posey also recalled that everyone was instructed to do cardio on the exercise bike after practice in front of a massive TV screen displaying every player’s information from their machine, while Riley walked around like a drill sergeant. “You can’t cheat it,” Posey said. “So he knows if you are going hard or not.”

 

For someone like Posey, a veteran in his seventh season, the training put him in the best shape of his life. He was already an exceptionally good defender, and being leaner helped him move quicker.  

 

Dwyane Wade also kept blossoming, and everything on the court ran through him, while locker room business went through O’Neal, Payton and Alonzo Mourning. Notably, O’Neal and Mourning, who turned 33 and 35 in March and February, were former rivals and came into the league in 1992 as the first and second picks. They had 19 All-Star appearances combined before the year started, and Payton had recorded nine All-NBA selections. It was a leadership group with serious credibility. 

 

Mourning, an intense and committed man to his craft, was particularly a hawk at practices and in the weight room, and he would not tolerate low RPMs. Anyone that showed up unprepared was going to get called out. 

 

The bond between Wade and O’Neal got stronger as well throughout the year. According to Mike Wallace, formerly of the Miami Herald and now with Grind City Media, some of it had to do with Shaq giving him the ‘Flash’ nickname, and Wade embracing it. 

 

There were “some things that Dwyane Wade took on in terms of entitlement, that was because Shaquille O’Neal came in with the already sense of entitlement, in terms of how you are going to be treated and what you are going to be doing,” Wallace told FRSN. “The Dwyane Wade that became a superstar in Miami, the seeds were planted by Shaq’s influence.”

 

Erik Spoelstra, an assistant coach at the time and formerly a video coordinator, played an important role in Wade’s rise, too. Heat play-by-play broadcaster Eric Reid told Five Reasons Sports Network that Spoelstra worked with Wade on every aspect of his game. 

 

They closed out the regular season with a 21-10 record, and seven of those losses came in April. On top of that, Mourning injured his left calf muscle and missed the last 14 games of the year. Riley wasn’t sweating the last month, and a 52-30 record was good enough for the second seed, which was 12 games behind the Pistons. 

 

Before their series with the Chicago Bulls started, the Associated Press reported that Riley spent four days in his home state, New York, with his sick mother, Mary, who was age 96. He came back to Miami two days before Game 1. 

 

The Heat are at the halfway point of the year (21-20), and they’ve been unable to sustain prosperity or recapture the vibes from the first 11 games. Securing home court has proven too challenging, and they aren’t any good on the road, either. It will take lots of work to turn the corner, as their three worst shooting fourth quarters have come in January versus top competition.

 

The offense has been 20th in the league over the last 10 outings, while logging the second-highest pace. There is an element of teams starting to figure them out, but they’ve had nights in which they didn’t show up to play, affecting those numbers as well. 

 

Norman Powell said their Achilles heel is adversity, and he’s right. They melt as soon as things get hard, and it was no different on Thursday in the washout at home against the Celtics.  They conceded a season-worst 31 second-chance points and were outscored by 15 in the fourth quarter.

 

Bam Adebayo said that they’ll keep being in the middle of the pack unless they all commit to “doing role player things.”

 

The problems 

 

• Suspect defense

 

The team is logging a top-six defensive rating, but it could be smoke and mirrors. They surrender 36.5 open to wide-open 3-pointers per game because of over-help and reckless closeouts. In fairness, the rest of the league is not that much better at protecting the arc, but too many Heat games hang in the balance of the opposing shooter’s hands.  

 

•  Too many players are worthy of starting 

 

The team was without Tyler Herro for 73% of their outings, and incorporating a piece like him is no easy task because he takes about 17 shots per game. Offensively, he has not missed a beat. But coach Erik Spoelstra still has to find the right combinations with him, since they are too vulnerable defensively when running a three-guard set next to Davion Mitchell and Powell. All options should be on the table, even with Herro and Powell scoring at an All-Star level, or with Mitchell being a strong point-of-attack pest who is critical to the transition attack. 

 

• Adebayo has not been a max player

 

Adebayo is having his second-lowest scoring season since becoming a starter (17.0) and has not been a fluid offensive player for most of the year. He even had a stretch from Dec. 18 through Jan. 11, failing to score at least 20 points in 11 consecutive outings. He started the year in a funk, too, and he told Five Reasons Sports Network before the fifth game in San Antonio that it wasn’t because defenses were doing anything special; he was just missing shots. Thirty-six games later, and the problems have persisted.

 

He has been through a pair of injuries since (foot and back spasms), but it’s not the entire reason for his decline. Regardless, he needs to pick up his scoring and aggression because it’s impossible to be a good team when such a large percentage of the salary is going to a high-level role player. If adding more screen rolls into the offense is what’s needed to bring him back to form, so be it.  

 

• The Ware dilemma. 

 

The most effective way to send a message to a player is by slicing their minutes. Spoelstra was left with no choice but to bench Ware for the second half of the meltdown against the Celtics because of waning vigor. Then he made the mistake of throwing his developing pupil under the bus for the second time since the Summer League. 

 

“He’s stacking days in the wrong direction now,” Spoelstra said. Yet he also included the accusation that Ware plays for himself: “I get it with young players. You sometimes subconsciously play poorly to say, ‘Hey, I’ll play poorly until you give me the minutes I think I deserve.’ That’s not how this works.”

 

If that assessment is correct, he snitched, and that team credo of only keeping issues in-house is a load of drivel, unless they want to send a message. So much for trust, eh. 

 

But what if he’s wrong, and there’s a misunderstanding between coach, management, and player on where or what Ware should be midway through year two?

 

Anytime a coach needs to send a message through the media, they’ve failed, and it’s possibly an indication that their word isn’t as strong as others believe it is. 

 

Adebayo was diplomatic, playing the good cop, offering sage advice to his teammate. As this storyline, which Spo revealed in July, continues, perhaps the coach should take a page from the captain’s leadership playbook.   

 

The Heat snapped their three-game losing streak, prosperously commencing their homestand (3) with a quality win against the Suns. It was a grueling effort, as they nearly blew a significant lead, yet their half-court offense delivered in crunch time.

 

Coach Erik Spoelstra said, “Four quarters of playing like we did in the third quarter, that’s not going to win a lot of games.”

But early, Bam Adebayo and Tyler Herro were raining jumpers, and the Suns called a timeout after Jaime Jaquez Jr. slashed through the lane for a second-chance layup, putting the Heat ahead by 10 points late in the first quarter. The hosts continued pouring in trifectas, but Grayson Allen scored Phoenix’s last 11 points of the period to keep them from flatlining.

 

Phoenix’s open, long-range misses piled up, yet Dillon Brooks carried them as he kamikazed into the lane and blasted from the middle in the second frame. Still, the other side countered with relentless inside pressure and overwhelmed them on the glass, going into halftime up by 17.

 

Their 20-point lead was subsequently sliced to one in the third courtesy of Brooks’ encore, punching the gas in transition and giving Miami a taste of their own medicine with strong offensive rebounding. He even drew a technical foul, his 15th for the year, pushing Norman Powell, and kept it going after that with drive-bys. One of their only mishaps was that Devin Booker limped to the locker room after a collision with Pelle Larsson.

 

“I thought we had the right intentions, coming out and trying to play the right way, play with the right energy,” Powell said. “I think it’s in that third quarter. It came down to missing shots, and [the Suns] capitalizing on that.”

 

It took fewer than three minutes into the fourth for the Heat to lose the lead because they didn’t guard the corner and got boat-raced in transition, forcing Spoelstra to call a stoppage. They fell behind by as much as five points late, then the Suns started losing their composure with excessive physicality. On top of that, Jaquez turned into playmaker #1, and Adebayo dunked twice and downed three 3-pointers to bail them out.

 

The Heat won 127-121 and had five players score between 10 and 29 points.

 

Takeaways:

 

• The Suns came into Miami on a three-game winning streak and had won eight of their last 10 outings. They had held opponents to 102.9 in their last seven wins, but they played like they had the South Beach flu for the first half, conceding 15 baskets in the restricted area and getting nothing on the fast break. Yet they were smacking the Heat around in the third quarter, outscoring them by 17.

 

• The Heat scored at least 70 points in the first half for the ninth time this season (71), remaining undefeated on those nights. Part of the reason for their early success was that Adebayo had an excellent half, making jumpers and a few shots in the paint. He had a quiet third frame, but was the team’s source of offense when they needed it the most late. He finished with 29 points on 73.3% shooting, with nine rebounds and four assists.

 

• The Heat couldn’t contain them on the offensive glass, permitting 18 extra opportunities that turned into 20 second-chance points. They were also clueless on how to guard the 3-point line, getting burned by six deep baskets. Keep in mind that Phoenix only had 14 treys for the game.

 

• The Heat started their small-ball lineup of Davion Mitchell, Tyler Herro, Powell, Andrew Wiggins and Adebayo. They played the best they ever have together, yet Mitchell didn’t return because of a left shoulder contusion, and the defense suffered late at the point of attack. Spoelstra gave no update on him at the presser. 

 

• Jaquez was a force, finishing at close range seven times on dribble moves and cuts. He also set up others through the drive and kick, including three of Adebayo’s big-time threes in the fourth, and Powell’s late shot in the corner. Jaquez had eight assists and zero turnovers, to go along with 16 points, 43.8% shooting. 

 

• Spoelstra said after the game that they “are going to conquer the third quarter,” and that the team has a positive teaching point from the win.