HEAT 104 - Nuggets 117 Recap

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Well, it took 12 contests and four losses to get to our annual game of “Cats and Dogs Living Together. Mass Hysteria.” The Miami HEAT at least made it to Game 17 last season.

There has to be one of these games every year. When a few losses pile on top of one another and everything looks far worse than it really is. Miami’s flat 117-104 loss to the Denver Nuggets comes two days after consecutive losses to the Golden State Warriors and Los Angeles Clippers, but those games, with their missed free-throws and late-game shortcomings had far more to do with one another than this loss.

As Erik Spoelstra said after the game, each game has its own story. And this one deserves a little perspective.

When the full season schedule was released about a month ago, a night in Denver, at the tail end of a five-game road trip, is a game you circle, and then draw an X through. A schedule loss. To which many will immediately say, “That’s an excuse.” It’s just something every team in the league goes through at one point or another, the reason no team will ever go through a regular season without losing a game.

As for what happened on the court, Spoelstra summed things up the best.

“Sometimes in this league its never quite as good as you think it is when you’re playing well and never as bad when you’re not getting the result that you want.”

The HEAT set a difficult standard to live up to in the opening week of the season, which might be what makes this loss tougher to digest for some. Last year, as Spoelstra sat at the postgame podium, saying that the team cannot let go of the rope, it made sense. The panic button was still hit by some, but for the most part it was understood that the team would take some time to gel.

But coming off a trip to the NBA Finals and the grand debut of faster offensive pace, the growing pains should be over and done with, right?

That’s not true in any season, least of all this one. Every season, every team has to re-learn how to approach the various situations offered by basketball, some experiencing higher highs or lower lows than others. Nobody starts at the bottom of the hill and strolls up to the top, especially when boulders are tumbling from above.

At some point, the schedule hits you, the legs gets tired and the mind soon follows, and before you know it, Nene is cutting down the middle of the lane, coiling for a dunk.

For the teams that are good enough, it doesn’t matter. Beating The San Antonio Spurs or Los Angeles Lakers next week, even if Miami does it playing worse than they did in the past three games, erases memories of the week before.

If bad habits develop, if Miami suddenly loses its ability to rotate across the lane or set solid screens at the elbows – or the HEAT suddenly becomes the worst free-throw shooting team of the last decade – then these are games you point back to as the genesis of the negative.

But there is randomness in basketball, some games you have a higher chance of losing than others, and most games have nothing to do with one another, until the playoffs, when consecutive games are against the same opponent.

If thinking about the Nuggets hitting 12-of-25 from three and getting assists on 60 percent of their field goals still has your neurons firing for that glowing red panic button, consider first what this game will mean if Miami finds itself on another deep playoff run. And sleep on it.