Miami Heat drop another key game to fall to 1-3 on year against Raptors

The Miami Heat started Tuesday night’s game very eerily similar to the way they started Saturday night’s defeat to the Brooklyn Nets.

Making quite a few of their shots to open the game, the Miami Heat had to remind themselves not to fall in love with the notion of shot-making and shot-making alone, as they had it on Saturday night en route to being blown out in their own building.

And though that didn’t appear to be the case for much of the game, it would end up being the case for the Miami Heat team that simply didn’t show enough effort on the defensive end. To be pretty simple about it, the Miami Heat were out-toughed on Tuesday night.

The Toronto Raptors shot a whopping 22.2 percent from three-point territory, 8/36 to be specific but managed to blow the heat out, effectively, in the minutes that mattered the most.

The Miami Heat need to stack wins in hopes of climbing out of the NBA Play-In, but they couldn’t on Tuesday—again, falling to 1-3 against Toronto this year.

And though the Miami Heat would make a comeback attempt late in the game, that would be with around just three minutes left, where the Raptors had gotten out to nearly a 20-point lead off the back of their two-point makes alone. That is just unacceptable.

A team should never be able to do that in that manner. It’s one thing for a team to be beating you while not hitting the three-ball— but for a team to be blowing you out while not making many threes is another thing.

Again, it shows a total lack of effort and that’s what was the Miami Heat’s downfall on Tuesday, just as it seemed to be on Saturday.

The Miami Heat were without Jimmy Butler on Tuesday, something that they hope to remedy on Wednesday in the second leg of a back-to-back set of games in New York. They need to have a better effort when facing the Knicks or they can just go ahead and book a ticket to the play-in round.

And with the math setting them up for a chance to face the Raptors in the first round of that situation, they probably want to do all they can to avoid the team that has already managed to beat them three times in there four meetings thus far on the regular season.