1. Sometimes the perfect antidote for a losing streak is to just shoot much, much better than your opponent. In the first half of this one, that was the winning formula with Minnesota shooting 12 percent from deep creating a perfect storm, of sorts, on the defensive side of things for Miami as they were able to maintain their defensive shape without having to pay any debts on the perimeter. The HEAT led by as much as 15 behind the combination of being the team with better energy that was also getting more shots to fall.
Tough to make that last forever, no matter how well you’re contesting shots. Behind Jordan McLaughlin’s hot streak – he hit as many threes in the third quarter, three, as he had in the entire season entering this game – the Wolves flipped the entire script after the break much in the same way Cleveland had in the second the night before. At first it was a 15-2 run, which then grew to 21-4 and eventually ballooned out to 30-7. Missed shots got Minnesota out in transition which led to makes and Miami having to score more in the half-court, where they scored 74.2 points per 100 possessions (not counting offensive boards).
Down five headed into the fourth, Miami tied it back up with back-to-back threes from Kyle Lowry and Max Strus and retook the lead with an advantage bucket. The loss in Cleveland aside, Miami has been among the league leaders in clutch games so why not add another one to the ledger? Neither team could get much in the way of consistent, coherent offense down the stretch, but the Wolves made a couple more shots – Anthony Edwards wasn’t efficient with 22 points on 21 shots but rallied late – and Rudy Gobert (a career sub-70 percent foul shooter) hit four free-throws in a row to put things just out of reach as the HEAT fell, 105-101. Miami finishes their road trip 0-4 and now heads home for two in a row against the Wizards.
2. This wasn’t a night for standout efficiency, but good performances all around from the HEAT with six players in double figures. Kyle Lowry (21 points, nine assists, three steals and two blocks in 44 minutes) continued his do-it-all stretch with Miami again missing multiple ballhandlers from its rotation, keeping the team organized offensively while maintaining a good sense of the moment for when he needs to be the offense. He even came up with two huge stops against Karl-Anthony Towns – fouling him out on the second – in the final minutes to keep Miami hanging within striking distance. Jamal Cain made the best impression of his young career, earning the trust of Erik Spoelstra for crunch-time minutes and scoring off smart, timely cuts. Haywood Highsmith hit a pair of threes and showed good energy. And Nikola Jović, starting again at the four, made some noise as a grab-and-go ballhandler when the HEAT were singing their tune in the first half.
Bam Adebayo only finished with 17 points on 18 shots, but a couple notable items about his night. First, without Tyler Herro and Jimmy Butler, he was consistently aggressive even against a big, long team that could keep him out of the paint. Second, despite much of his overall shot diet falling into his usual short-to-mid-range profile, Adebayo tried out a number of creative, wrong-footed finishes against Gobert that were worth a raised eyebrow or two. All part of his evolution as he’s come a long way from not having experience balancing his playmaking duties with the space being afforded to him by big centers to the player we see today who, as with veterans like Lowry and Butler, has an advanced sense of when to go and when to find his teammates.
3. Earlier in the season one of Miami’s red-flag issues was how leaky their transition defense was. That has since been mostly cleaned up – teams still run on them quite a bit but that’s as much a scouting report element as it is anything the HEAT are doing wrong – and even though they haven’t been much of a fast-break team themselves outside of steal-and-scores, they blistered the Wolves tonight for 17 transition points in the first half.
Those opportunities dried up a bit in the second half, which naturally happens when your opponent is making more shots, but the energy did not. Part of the reason that transition defense improved from those first couple weeks is that Miami hasn’t been crashing the offensive glass with nearly as much regularity as last season. Grabbing 12 offensive boards (seven from Adebayo and Caleb Martin) may not be the gaudiest total you’ll see this year – the Wolves have had some rebounding issues despite starting regularly playing two centers – but Miami isn’t in this one at the end without them. You never want to put up an Offensive Rating of 95.2 for an evening, but it’s telling that Miami was right there in the final minute despite it and that speaks to how sharp they were in all other facets.