Miami Heat: Having Goran Dragic back wasn’t enough in loss vs. Pistons

The 26-32 Miami Heat fell to the Detroit Pistons in Goran Dragic’s first game back in the past few months, which may be a sign for this mediocre Heat team to not make the playoffs this season.

The 10th seeded Miami Heat have fallen into a dicey predicament after their embarrassing 119-96 loss at home to the Detroit Pistons, as the franchise isn’t going up or down and is stuck in basketball purgatory.

In a game where we saw the return of Goran Dragic and how he immediately impacted the game, scoring 4 points in his first 3 minutes of action, it wasn’t enough as he only played 16 minutes and didn’t do much. The Pistons heavily outscored Miami going into the 3rd quarter, as well as finishing the game with 35 points in the 4th, holding the Heat to only 20 points. Moreover, in an odd turn of events, it wasn’t Blake Griffin, Andre Drummond, or Reggie Jackson that tipped the scale in this Pistons’ win, it was the Detroit bench that produced 56 points from Luke Kennard, Langston Galloway, and Ish Smith.

As for Miami, aside from some solid Josh Richardson, Dion Waiters, and Dwyane Wade performances, it was mostly a dry game for the rest of the unit. Which isn’t a good sign for the foreseeable future, as the Heat and their future Hall of Famer Wade are very adamant about still making the playoffs, even if they aren’t too sure what the problem is right now, per Ira Winderman of the Sun Sentinel:

"“We are who we are,” Wade said after his team fell to 26-32. “And I’ve been saying this all year. You would love to, you would love to turn it on. We obviously played well in certain games that people probably were like, ‘Wow, they played well.’“The ones all year that we need to win, especially here at home, we’ve played terrible at home for some reason.”"

While the Heat haven’t been playing that well at home, they still have one of the hardest schedules down-the-stretch of any NBA team, meaning that no excuse is acceptable as Pat Riley already made it known that this team isn’t taking and they are definitely fighting for the playoffs.

Tune in tonight to see the Heat play at home vs. the Phoenix Suns in a return game for Tyler Johnson, who is coming off a 29 point performance in his last Suns’ outing.