being without Norman Powell<\/a> for a fourth consecutive game as he works through an upper-respiratory illness, Tyler Herro was ruled out short before the opening tip due to personal reasons.<\/p>\n\u2013 That had the Heat opening with a lineup of Bam Adebayo, Andrew Wiggins, Pelle Larsson, Simone Fontecchio and Davion Mitchell.<\/p>\n
\u2013 The Heat won their previous lone game starting that lineup.<\/p>\n
\u2013 The Wizards, deep in the abyss of a tank-a-thon, were without Anthony Davis, Kyshawn George, D\u2019Angelo Russell, Cam Whitmore, Trae Young, Alex Sarr and Tristan Vuk\u010devi\u0107.<\/p>\n
\u2013 That had them opening with the eclectic first five of\u00a0 Anthony Gill, Bilal Coulibaly, Bub Carrington, Tre Johnson and Will Riley.<\/p>\n
\u2013 Jaime Jaquez Jr. and Kel\u2019el Ware entered together first off the Heat bench.<\/p>\n
\u2013 With Kasparas Jakucionis following, after previously being out of the rotation in favor of Dru Smith.<\/p>\n
\u2013 Spoelstra said Powell simply was not ready to go Saturday, despite returning to practice Friday after missing the previous three games due to an upper-respiratory illness.<\/p>\n
\u2013 \u201cHe still has some big-time lingering effects,\u201d Spoelstra said. \u201cTwo days ago he felt a little bit better. Yesterday he was able to get some work in, and he\u2019ll continue to work.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2013\u00a0 Not only did Jaquez leave immediately after the game for Phoenix and the NCAA women\u2019s Final Four game there on Sunday to watch his sister play for UCLA, but Spoelstra spoke pregame of spending time with UCLA coach Cori Close this season when the Heat was in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
\u2013 \u201cShe came to our practice, and she is so impressive,\u201d Spoelstra said. \u201cWe\u2019ve exchanged texts and calls over the years. We have similar coaching circles where we bounce ideas off each other. But she is a tremendous culture builder.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2013 Also before the game, Spoelstra spoke of former Heat big man Amar\u2019e Stoudemire formally being named Saturday to the Basketball Hall of Fame.<\/p>\n
\u2013 \u201cWe enjoyed our time with Stat,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was a fun year. He\u2019s a heck of a personality. We had him, obviously, at the tail end of his career. So a lot of his time was just managing his body just to be available. But what a talent.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2013 With his team completing an epic tank-at-thon of a season, Wizards coach Brian Keefe was asked pregame about the considerable amount of blowout games this season.<\/p>\n
\u2013 \u201cFor a coach, I think we\u2019re so focused on the day,\u201d he said. \u201cI probably don\u2019t look at the big picture of those things. I know the league will look at those types of things. For me, I\u2019m just focused on today and our team, so I probably can\u2019t comment too much on that.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2013 Keefe was asked pregame about being back at the scene of Adebayo\u2019s 83-point game against the Wizards in the teams\u2019 previous meeting.<\/p>\n
\u2013 \u201cI think we handle things the way we\u2019ve been handling since I\u2019ve got here,\u201d he said. \u201cReally, nothing has changed. We focus on our day-to-day habits, how we prepare, how we train. All that other stuff is this outside noise.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2013 He added, \u201cWe just focus on what we can control. What we can control is how we prepare and how we work on things. Our team does a great job of that, and that\u2019s what we\u2019re going to continue to do the rest of the year.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MIAMI \u2013 Observations and other notes of interest from Saturday\u2019s 152-136 victory over the Washington Wizards: \u2013 For…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":698472,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3778],"tags":[7,144,165,295,189,3880,3881,6,66],"class_list":{"0":"post-698471","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-miami-heat","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-heat","10":"tag-latest-headlines","11":"tag-miami","12":"tag-miami-heat","13":"tag-miami-heat-blog","14":"tag-miamiheat","15":"tag-nba","16":"tag-sports"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116348572289181317","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698471","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=698471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698471\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/698472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=698471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=698471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=698471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}