The Miami Heat are a ball club that wins on hard work, hustle, effort, and all the other intangible stuff that you can’t teach and that they preach all the time. They win that way when they have a talented roster, such as the Big 3 Era, or when they have a roster that features Dion Waiters as one of your best players.
That’s just the crux of it all. With that, we take you live to Sacramento to the aftermath of what should have been a Miami Heat victory over the winless Kings Saturday.
To the point made a little bit ago, being without their two main backup bigs in Dewayne Dedmon and Omer Yurtseven, the Miami Heat should have known that they would have to continue to give an extra effort—nonetheless the same vibrant effort that should come with Miami Heat basketball on any occasion.
However, they didn’t. And to that point, they would find themselves down 20 points or so as the second half got underway.
The Miami Heat had a game Saturday, but most of them didn’t realize it until the second half started. That kind of effort gets you beat every single time.
With Jimmy Butler finishing with only seven points, Kyle Lowry finishing with only two points, and the defense, as a whole, mirroring those two offensive efforts in the first half, it’s no wonder that was the read as the buzzer sounded on the first half of play.
But there was a half to go and that’s the one that saw the real Miami Heat show up. Outscoring the Kings to a tune of 64-48 in the second half of the game, the Miami Heat would actually pull to within one point of the lead with around six minutes to go in the game.
They couldn’t completely close the gap though and thus, the Kings would go on to win. The Miami Heat ran out of gas, some could say, but that wouldn’t be an issue if they never dig that hole to begin with.
There will be a ton of theories or reasons out there for the defeat: “this team stinks”, “they are too small”, “Kyle Lowry should be traded”, among many others, and while some of them may have some relevancy to them, this game was singularly about none of them.
They could have won this game, going away in easy fashion, had they come to play from the very onset of the game. There was a different kind of activity, urgency, and want to present in the second half and that’s why they had a chance to win.
They didn’t though and this is a terrible defeat in the end, that’s all you can really say. They can only go up from here though and hopefully, they begin that ascent more sooner than later.