Spoelstra addresses Heat’s late-game inbounding issues
Late-game inbounding plays have become a challenge for the Miami Heat recently, and it’s an issue coach Erik Spoelstra plans to address.
The latest example came with 15.1 seconds remaining in the fourth quarter of Sunday’s 10096 home win against the New Orleans Pelicans. With the Heat ahead by two points and looking to seal the win, guard Kyle Lowry needed to burn consecutive timeouts before lobbing an inbounds pass to Jimmy Butler that Pelicans guard Dyson Daniels was able to get his hands on to force a jump ball on the Heat’s third attempt to get the ball in.
This came less than a week after the Heat was called for a five-second inbounding violation while trying to rally from a sixpoint deficit with 25.4 second to play in last Monday’s road loss to the Atlanta Hawks.
The Heat also had to burn its final two timeouts while trying to inbound the ball with 3.2 seconds left while trailing by one point in a Jan. 8 home matchup against the Brooklyn Nets that it ended up losing by that narrow margin.
“We’ll go to work on that,” Spoelstra said. “It’s an alignment I’ve used for a long time. Ironically it really stems from our playoff series against Toronto [in 2016] when [Lowry] was with Toronto a long time ago. We were struggling inbounding the ball, and we had a bunch of people there.
“So I know probably everybody is saying, ‘Well, you got to run some actions.’ It just brings more defenders there. We’ve got a lot of good mileage out of this alignment. But we probably do need to evolve and add a couple things and that’s what we’re going to work on. Hopefully we’ll be in these situations a lot more, when we’re in control and we have to inbound the ball to get free throws to get the win.”
THE FLOATER
Heat guard Tyler Herro is a gifted scorer, so it’s no surprise that he has a skill set that features a bunch of different go-to shots.
One of them is the floater.
Herro finished Sunday’s win 3 of 3 on floaters on his way to totaling a team-high 26 points on 10-of-22 shooting from the field.
For the season, Herro is shooting an efficient 56 of 96 (58.3 percent) on floaters, according to NBA tracking stats. That’s a big improvement from last regular season, when he shot 65 of 151 (43 percent) on floaters.
“He’s just ridiculously skilled and that floater is not as easy as it looks to the average fan,” Spoelstra said. “But it’s a strength shot for him. He’s going to find a way to make an impact one way or another, whether shots are going down or not. On the road trip, he also made some really great finishes all the way getting to the rim. Sometimes that will be play-making. But he’s really starting to evolve to make the right read for that moment.”
THIS AND THAT
With an Eastern Conference
● finals rematch against the Boston Celtics on deck Tuesday at MiamiDade Arena, Heat center
Bam Adebayo was asked if facing the Celtics feels different because of the teams’ playoff matchups over the years.
The Heat has faced the Celtics in the playoffs in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2020 and 2022.
“I mean, obviously, there’s history there from before we were here,” Adebayo said. “And some people still carry that
weight. It’s one of those things that you just got to inherit. Some people just don’t understand it, they don’t get it. But when the Celtics come in, we always try to make it a dog fight. It’s one of the two teams in the conference that I feel like we see each other every year in the playoffs. ... So for us, trying to make this push in our playoff run, we got to go through them.”
The Heat entered
●
Monday ranked 27th in team three-point percentage at 33.5 percent. Miami closed last regular season as the NBA’s top threepoint shooting team at
37.9 percent on its way to entering the playoffs as the East’s top seed.
“I think they moved the rims,” Lowry joked Sunday. “They unbalanced it and the floor looks different. That’s something that happens. If they can move the rim and balance it, then we’ll make some shots.”
The Heat ruled out
●
Nikola Jovic (lower back stress reaction), Duncan Robinson (finger surgery) and Omer Yurtseven
(ankle surgery) for Tuesday’s game. There are no other players on the
Heat’s injury report.
The Celtics’ injury report for Tuesday’s game has not been released yet because they play Monday night against the Magic in Orlando on the front end of a back-to-back.