You saw it ever-so-briefly during the Miami Heat’s latest third-quarter collapse, a recent 99-83 loss to the Portland Trail Blazers. Chris Kaman, Portland’s backup center, was scoring at will and had just spun away from Miami’s Chris Andersen for another easy basket.
Kaman is not the most fleet-footed big man but he’d left Andersen planted to the hardwood floor like a palm tree on South Beach. The Birdman, meanwhile, dropped his hands in frustration and stared at teammate Chirs Bosh as if to say, “Where’s the help?”
Just as it has been for awhile, the answer is that help isn’t coming and this season, one formerly filled with promise, is now on the verge of a collapse.
After 33 games, this Heat team is as impossible to figure out today as they were after Game 1. While early season woes could be attributed to injury and a demanding schedule, those excuses aren’t valid anymore.
Having Josh McRoberts in and out of the lineup may have disrupted the team’s substitution patterns but he rarely got a chance to showcase the skills that helped make last year’s Charlotte Bobcats a playoff team before suffering a season-ending knee injury. Bosh, Andersen and Dwyane Wade missed a number of games but they’re all back and as productive as ever.
Similarly, despite a number of road games and a number of back-to-back sets to start the year, the Heat recently enjoyed a seven-game homestand to potentially turn things around. Things went terribly wrong, however, with Miami losing five of those games, including a four-point loss to the Philadelphia 76ers and a one-point loss to division rival Orlando.
A Dec. 25 win over LeBron James and the Cavaliers was the homestand’s brightest moment, but it only masked the stink like Febreze in a room full of Azerbaijani wrestlers.
More from Hoops Habit
- The 5 most dominant NBA players who never won a championship
- 7 Players the Miami Heat might replace Herro with by the trade deadline
- Meet Cooper Flagg: The best American prospect since LeBron James
- Are the Miami Heat laying the groundwork for their next super team?
- Sophomore Jump: 5 second-year NBA players bound to breakout
That seems to be a common theme for the season, with the Heat doing just enough to give the team’s fans hopes of a season turnaround. A surprising 5-2 start kept the team relevant while they lost four of their next five games. The hope that McRoberts would eventually contribute at a high level carried the team through an injury-marred November.
Beating James — without Bosh in the lineup! — was a Christmas miracle.
The team’s most recent win (a Jan. 4 game against the Nets) fits the same mold, giving fans a false hope before Miami embarked on a five-game road trip.
Of course, the first game of the trip was the blowout loss to the Blazers.
Miami has gone 3-8 in their last 11 games, and recent comments from Heat players reveal that the thin facade is starting to crack and could soon totally fall apart. As Wade recently told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel:
“…we’re not good enough to come back on teams. We’re just not. So if we don’t build that togetherness and be able to hold on when we’re not playing as well, then we’ll just be winning one and we’ll lose three. We’ll keep doing that.”
Chris Bosh echoed that feeling of despair in a separate interview:
“I think it’s to the point where it’s just in our minds now. It’s a mind thing, because it’s not one thing. It’s a culmination of different things over the course of a season…I think it’s just messing with our heads now. And we’re letting it get in there and just agitate us, and we end up in these same positions because our brain isn’t right, collectively and individually.”
Perhaps more telling is Bosh’s curt response when asked what the answer was to Miami’s noted habit of falling apart in the second half of games, particularly the third quarter (where the Heat rank last in scoring for the period):
“That’s not my job. My job is to go out there and play basketball.”
It would seem that Miami’s star player is putting the pressure on head coach Erik Spoelstra who, not surprisingly, deferred the blame back onto the players:
“…there’s a couple of turnovers in those first three minutes (of the third quarter against Portland) that had nothing to do with bad play calls. Play calls had nothing to do with the offensive rebounds, the transition possessions you can save. Defending like you do in the first half, holding a team under 40 percent and then in the second half they have a 33-point quarter, it has nothing to do with play calls.”
The truth, as usual, lies somewhere in between with players having to perform better on the court while Spoelstra has to be more flexible with substitution patterns that have been confusing at best. Consider the Portland game, where Andersen (newly-established as the team’s starter at center) was being victimized by Kaman.
Meanwhile, Hassan Whiteside, who has flourished since joining the Heat, sat on the bench despite his six points, four rebounds and four blocks in limited second-quarter minutes.
In a vacuum, Bosh’s and Spoelstra’s comments could be seen as attempts to light a collective fire under a team struggling for answers. But context isn’t always necessary and it’s clear that the season is taking a toll on everyone in the Heat franchise.
Losing exposes the worst of a team while winning does much to mask what could be considered dysfunctional.
And with losses continuing to mount, you can expect that the Heat, a team well-known for their established culture of success, will reveal many more flaws as the season progresses.