The Good, Bad and Miami Heat Culture: Consistency lacks in losses

The Bad

The Heat have proved they can play well defensively, but when they are off, there’s not much hope to be had that they can close out games.

The biggest example during this week was in the team’s loss against the now 3-9 Wizards.

The Wizards have not been able to find any strides this year, yet the Heat let them score 116 points, while shooting better than average at 48.2 percent.

Anthony Chiang of the Miami Herald discussed in an article how the Heat’s focus is on defense, but they cannot seem to do that right consistently.

"Without a pure scorer on the Heat’s roster, Spoelstra has repeatedly said defense is the most realistic path to success for this team. But quality defense hasn’t consistently been there as a path for Miami to take this year. The Heat is now 0-5 when allowing opponents to shoot better than 48 percent this season."

The one thing that can lead the Heat to wins — defense — is something that they cannot even depend on every night; the efforts seem to be a rollercoaster.

The worst part of it all, is that Miami seems to continuously play down to bad teams.

The win against the Portland Trailblazers may not have been a cake walk, but they still managed to get it done. Whereas against a team like the Wizards, they completely crumbled apart, and were left trying to play catch up in a performance that was too little, too late.

Yes, Whiteside is putting up great numbers, but he is one person. The collective efforts have yet to be found this season and those close losses have to begin to turnover into wins soon.

Otherwise, the Heat are looking at a tricky path to the playoffs, in an Eastern Conference that they should be able to handle.