go into the play-in defenseless<\/a>.<\/p>\n\u2013 \u201cWe weren\u2019t able to take advantage of a couple opportunities that we wanted to,\u201d Spoelstra said of the trail leading to Wednesday night, \u201cbut we still have an opportunity where we are, and we have to focus now on compartmentalizing and really just taking each game as an opportunity to take another step forward.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2013 Instead, another step back, to No. 10 in the East.<\/p>\n
\u2013 Which makes each of the five remaining games all about play-in seeding.<\/p>\n
\u2013 \u201cEach one of these games can prepare us for what we have ahead,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u2013 Can they?<\/p>\n
\u2013 Hard to contend that this one did that.<\/p>\n
\u2013 With only one game over the next five days (Saturday at home against the Wizards), there could be time to regroup.<\/p>\n
\u2013 But the reality is so much of the Eastern Conference has passed them by.<\/p>\n
\u2013 Most notably the Celtics.<\/p>\n
\u2013 With Norman Powell missing a third consecutive game due to illness, the Heat again opened with Tyler Herro, Bam Adebayo, Pelle Larsson,\u00a0 Andrew Wiggins and Davion Mitchell.<\/p>\n
\u2013 Kel\u2019el Ware and Jaime Jaquez Jr. entered together first off the Heat bench.<\/p>\n
\u2013 With Dru Smith then again playing ahead of Kasparas Jakucionis.<\/p>\n
\u2013 Simone Fontecchio made it nine deep for the Heat.<\/p>\n
\u2013 With not much from the bench.<\/p>\n
\u2013 Including Jaquez being -20 in just 6:31 in the opening period.<\/p>\n
\u2013 And Smith somehow -18 in 3:53 in his first-quarter minutes.<\/p>\n
\u2013 As for the faith factor, it is decidedly minimal with Ware at the moment.<\/p>\n
\u2013 Seemingly with the only alternative being to run Adebayo into the ground.<\/p>\n
\u2013 Which is why the failure of Nikola Jovic has stung.<\/p>\n
\u2013 He could have helped.<\/p>\n
\u2013 If he ever showed the fight to play in the power rotation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MIAMI \u2013 Observations and other notes of interest from Wednesday night\u2019s 147-129 loss to the Boston Celtics: \u2013…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":693055,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3766],"tags":[7,45,75,3798,46,165,189,3880,6,66],"class_list":{"0":"post-693054","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boston-celtics","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-boston","10":"tag-boston-celtics","11":"tag-bostonceltics","12":"tag-celtics","13":"tag-latest-headlines","14":"tag-miami-heat","15":"tag-miami-heat-blog","16":"tag-nba","17":"tag-sports"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116332643195075539","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=693054"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693054\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/693055"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=693054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=693054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=693054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}