The Miami Heat’s offense has been firing at peak efficiency at home lately. They’ll try to stay red-hot when they visit the Detroit Pistons on Monday night.
Miami carries a four-game winning streak into the contest with all of those victories recorded during a homestand. Miami has averaged 122.8 points during that stretch.
Yet center Bam Adebayo has a different take on the streak.
“I just feel like we’re making the right plays and we’re playing together,” he said. “Obviously, we’re doing it on the defensive end. Really getting stops, and really emphasizing and making that a priority.”
After some early-season tinkering, coach Erik Spoelstra has settled on a starting lineup of Tyler Herro, Duncan Robinson, Jimmy Butler, Haywood Highsmith and Adebayo, and it’s working. Miami is 8-2 in games that unit has started.
The Heat’s last trip to Detroit on Nov. 12 didn’t go well, particularly for Spoelstra. The game went to overtime and Spoelstra called a timeout he didn’t have with the score tied. That resulted in a technical foul and Malik Beasley’s free throw with 1.1 seconds left gave Detroit the lead in its 123-121 victory.
Detroit had seven players in double figures that night, led by Beasley and Cade Cunningham with 21 points apiece.
“As a coach, you always kind of think back,” Spoelstra said. “That could have been a win. But for players and coaching staff, alike, you just have opportunities to grow and get better constantly in this profession and that was an opportunity for me to check that box.
“All the reminders, protocols, you can’t do those kind of scenarios enough, whether they’re in watching film, walking through stuff with the team, going through my own personal checklist,” Spoelstra added. “And this is a game of human error, at times. Hopefully, I’ve become better for that.”
His players cut him some slack for the mental error.
“We talked about things before it happened and (Spoelstra) lost his train of thought at that point,” Adebayo said. “We’re all human. It happened, you got to move on.”
The Pistons have lost four of their last five games and eight of their last 11. They snapped a three-game losing streak with a 120-111 victory over host New York on Dec. 7 but got blown out in Boston in their lone game last week, 123-99 on Thursday.
“We’ve had some slippage because we haven’t had a ton of practice time,” coach J.B. Bickerstaff said. “This week has been really, really good for us to be able to get that practice time. And then, obviously, you play good offensive teams like we’ve played through this stretch, that’s gonna have an impact on it also.”
The perimeter defense has been particularly poor. They’ve dropped to the bottom five in the league in 3-point shooting percentage allowed (37.7 percent).
“You notice and try to recognize things that are trending,” Bickerstaff said. “I think our 3-point defense has slipped as of late as far as the quality of shots we’re giving up, the percentages that teams are making from those spots, and the breakdowns that are leading to those. I think we have shown some pretty consistent stretches of it, but we haven’t put together the four quarters that we’re looking for.”
–Field Level Media
