After two straight blowout losses at home, the Miami Heat entered Game 5 facing elimination. From opening tip-off, the Heat were overwhelmed by the Boston Celtics, resulting in a massive, season-ending, 118-84 loss Wednesday night at TD Garden.
Here are some key quotes from the Heat's final postgame press conference of the 2023-24 season.
Erik Spoelstra is not in the excuse making business
"We're not gonna put this on the fact that we've had some injuries." Erik Spoelstra said. "They've been the best team in basketball all season long and in this series in four of the games, they've played as such."
Spoelstra could have easily mentioned that his best player, Jimmy Butler, and key starter, Terry Rozier, were out, along with Duncan Robinson not being 100% and Jaime Jaquez Jr. being a scratch for Game 5. Instead, Spoelstra paid the Celtics their dues and paid Boston their respects for being the better team.
Outside of Game 2, where Miami set a new franchise record for most threes made in a playoff game, the Heat's only consistent source of offense this series was Bam Adebayo, who scored 20 or more points in all five games. There's no doubt that having a healthy Butler, Rozier and Robinson would have made life easier for the Heat's offense and it's unfortunate that the Heat were not at full strength in this Eastern Conference finals rematch.
But Spoelstra understood that he was entering this daunting task with a beat-up roster, and rather than give the media what-if scenarios, he decided to stay true to himself and credit the Celtics for a strong first-round performance.
Spoelstra highlights small margin of error in regular season
"We'll have plenty of time to go through the autopsy on the regular season," Spoelstra said. "It was super-competitive in both conferences and two or three wins could have made monumental differences."
With a long grocery list of games that the Miami Heat had no business losing, Spoelstra and the team will look back on a good amount of losses that set them back in the standings.
While injuries will be a topic of this series, there were plenty of games in the regular season that the Heat lost where most of their core players were available, such as the two home losses against the Washington Wizards and a Memphis Grizzlies team that was missing a multitude of starters including Ja Morant and Desmond Bane.
Teams are always going to have bad losses in the regular season, but the context in which Miami lost a fair amount of games with multiple blown leads and fell to short-handed and bad opponents is especially painful. Miami finished only three games from the third-seed Milwaukee Bucks.
Before the Heat entered the play-in, it would have been easy to say that last year's miracle run shows that Miami can flip a switch and return to the NBA Finals. But in reality, The Heat pulling off another finals trip after being in the play-in tournament was highly unlikely. This season showed that it's dangerous to play with fire, and avoiding the play-in tournament this season could have given the Heat a much better first-round opponent and an extra week of rest.
Instead, the Heat had to earn their playoff spot, and in the process, their best player in Jimmy Butler suffered a major injury. Hopefully, this season will show the Heat that avoiding the play-in tournament should be a number one priority instead of just making the playoffs at whatever spot and seeing how the cards unfold.
Bam Adebayo adapts right mentality in high-stakes moments
As Bam Adebayo's career has progressed, he has proven on multiple occasions that his game translates and elevates in the postseason not only because of his skillset, but also the mentality Adebayo adopted by making multiple deep postseason runs.
"Backs against the wall, everybody counting us out, guys injured," Adebayo said. "End of the day, I'm still available to play, I'ma be aggressive and give it everything I got."
Before sitting out the entire fourth quarter, Adebayo played the entire game and it was revealed by Spoelstra that he planned on playing Adebayo the entire game had the score stayed close. During those minutes, Adebayo was the Heat's only pulse on offense and kept his foot on the gas to try and pull the Heat into the game.
Adebayo also took the challenge of guarding Jayson Tatum as he did multiple times this series, but the Celtics took advantage of mismatches away from him and had their way offensively. Although the series did not go as planned, Adebayo was easily Miami's best player and was one of the top performers of the series.
A popular phrase when the playoffs come around is "16-game players." With five consecutive postseason appearances and multiple signature moments during that time period, it's clear that Adebayo is one of them and will continue to be a cornerstone in the Heat's future success.