Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Bad habit: Playing to foe’s level
MIAMI — To classify Wednesday night’s game against the Toronto Raptors as a good loss means making sure not to follow up with a bad one.
For the Heat, during these past few uneven seasons since LeBron James’ free-agency departure in the 2014 offseason, there has been little question about the ability to step up to challenges.
The problem has been otherwise playing down to competition.
That, in some respects, makes Friday night’s visit by the Cleveland Cavaliers to AmericanAirlines Arena a gauge on whether lessons have been learned.
Reeling amid a series of injuries that have robbed almost all of the scoring from their offense, the Cavaliers arrive a league-worst
8-27, including 3-14 on the road.
But this also is a Heat team that this season already has found ways to lose Brooklyn Nets (before they hit their recent stride), twice to the Atlanta Hawks and twice to the Orlando Magic.
It was after the most recent of those losses to the Magic that Dwyane Wade stood in the Heat locker room and warned that the Heat had no right to believe they are better than anyone, based on the depths of where the start of the season had deposited them. The Heat then went out and claimed at least partial restitution with Sunday’s blowout victory over the Magic at the Amway Center.
“That’s something that we’re trying to get across to a lot of our young guys who are playing a lot of minutes, is that we’re not good enough to take teams for granted,” Wade said after Thursday’s practice.
He said there have been times when the Heat, with loaded rosters, such as the Big Three unit with himself, James and Chris Bosh, could toy with such opposition. But he stressed this is not that time nor that team.
“We’ve had teams where we’ve been good enough, where we can turn it on in the last five minutes and win a game like that,” he said. “We’re not there yet. So we have to approach the Cleveland Cavaliers just like we approach the games this last 13 or 14 games we’ve been playing. Because this team can beat you. Any team in this league can beat you, especially when you’re not Golden State, when you’re not one of those teams than can just turn it on and score 20 points in five minutes.”
Now the question is whether lessons have been learned, with an upcoming stretch that includes a pair of games against the Cavaliers (also next Wednesday in Cleveland), the Hawks and the struggling Minnesota Timberwolves and Washington Wizards. The Heat, in fact, do not face a team currently with a winning record until the Denver Nuggets visit on Jan. 8.
“You can’t play to the level of your competition,” forward Josh Richardson said Thursday. “We’ve definitely fallen victim to that at times over the last couple of years.
“We’ve got to approach it just like we did [Wednesday]. I think we came out with our hardhats, ready to go. And we’ve just got to do that for the next few games.”
The Heat, like the upcoming opposition, also do not have a winning record in the wake of the loss to the Raptors that dropped them to 16-17, and from a tie for No. 6 in the East to within a half-game out of a playoff seed.
“I hope we’re over that,” Wade said of looking down on certain opponents. “It doesn’t mean you’re going to win every game. It’s the way you approach it. Sometimes you still end losing a few of those games. I’m just looking at our approach and how we approach these games and how we respect each team we’ve playing.
“We’re a game under .500. We’re trying to move up. This is an important stretch for us, because we’re going to have a stretch at some point where the schedule is not going to be in our favor. We’re going to be on the road a lot. So we’ve got to try to take care of the schedule when we can.”