Miami Heat: Why Game One Loss, 107-109, Doesn’t Mean Series Doom

The Miami Heat took a tough defeat in their 2021 NBA Playoffs opener. A game that, quite literally, came down to the wire, the Miami Heat weren’t able to make enough offensive plays in the end to win it.

That’s just the thing with this one for the Miami Heat though. They really weren’t able to find offense as a team on Saturday.

Heading into the third period, the Miami Heat as a team, were shooting the ball as horribly as possible and still had just as good a chance to win the thing as Milwaukee did. That was pretty evident based on the results, a game that went to overtime and was still only decided by two points.

Back to that frame entering the fourth though, outside of guys named Duncan Robinson and Goran Dragic, everyone else on the team had gone 15-48 from the floor at that point. Think about that?

The Miami Heat took a tough Game One defeat to the Bucks, but they had just as great a chance to win as Milwaukee did.

At 31 percent shooting for the rest of the team, outside of those two guys who kept the Miami Heat in it all day long, the Miami Heat had just as much control over this game as the Milwaukee Bucks did. The main point there is this.

The Miami Heat were less than 50 percent of themselves and still pushed the Bucks to the brink. Furthermore, their best player was a literal shell of himself.

Though he made what could have been the biggest bucket of the night, the layup that sent the game to overtime for the Miami Heat, Jimmy Butler wasn’t good on offense for the rest of the night. Though he made two threes, a tall task for him during his Heat tenure, he went just 4-22 from the field and that same 2-9 from three.

Though he finished with 17 points, 10 rebounds, and eight helpers, if he had made just a few more shots, then this game, likely, has a much different outcome. That’s the main reason why this series has not only, not reached doom territory for the Miami Heat after just one game, but is actually still in a pretty good place for the Miami Heat.

With their best player having one of the absolute worst games he could have had, they still managed to lose by only two in a close, tough, and hard fought game. Winning Game One on their floor would have been more than swell and though they had their chances, the Bucks were statistically supposed to win this one.

The Miami Heat have shown that they can buck the odds though and if everyone plays just a tad better, which they are more than capable of doing, then they will on buck it Monday. That’s the next time these teams meet, for Game Two and that too, should be a barn burner.