The best way to catch a good night’s sleep after watching a Miami Heat game apparently is turning it off after the third quarter.
Routinely, leads that had been in teens or 20s haven’t been much of a lead at all late in recent games.
Last Thursday, that meant Erik Spoelstra’s team finding itself in a four-point game late in New Orleans. Saturday, it meant what was a 21-point lead late in the third quarter against the visiting Brooklyn Nets was a two-point lead late in the fourth.
Still, the Heat won both, as part of the five-game winning streak they carry into FTX Arena on Tuesday night against the Dallas Mavericks.
“We need to do a better job, obviously, when we have the lead,” said Spoelstra, who chose to make a positive out of such negatives. “I think we’re getting great reps of what our fourth-quarter package is, where the ball’s going and how we want to do it. These are really important experiences for us to go through.
“It’s not as if we’re walking out of this building saying, ‘Oh, this is like exactly as how we wanted it to go.’ We know we have to be better. And the only way to really do it is to go through these experiences and go through some of the things that are disappointing and frustrating and work through it, and work through a coherent plan to be better the next time.”
Veteran forward P.J. Tucker takes a similar view.
“Always appreciate these moments when you get late-game big plays, even like the Toronto game, with triple-overtime,” he said of a home loss two weeks ago. “You get those games during the season, you kind of get better.
“You know, we’ve had a bunch of blowout games where we just won easily. So to get some of those games, you don’t want to lose, obviously, but to get that experience and learn from it early in the season is pretty good.”
To center Bam Adebayo it could be as simple as returning from the locker room at halftime with the approach that it’s a new game.
“We got to learn how to, when we’re up big in the first half, just continue in the second half,” he said. “I feel like sometimes we get relaxed and let teams get easy buckets because we’re up so much. We just got to cut their water off for the whole game.”
The Heat entered the week 14th in the 30-team league in net rating in what the NBA defines as clutch games (those within five points in the final five minutes), with 26 of their 57 games falling into that category. While they stand fourth in defensive rating in such situations, their offensive ranking in those circumstances is 26th.
The reality is that the fourth quarters of tight games are about as close as you can come during the regular season to replicating playoff conditions.
“Down the stretch,” guard Duncan Robinson said, “the game changes a little bit. It slows down. And when we’re able to play with pace and the ball is just getting up the floor, I think that’s when we’re just hardest to guard, because we just have so many different looks.
“But down the stretch of games, teams aren’t going to let you do that necessarily. So getting to our fourth-quarter sets and getting the ball where it needs to go is something we talked about a lot, and it’s something we’ll continue to talk about, obviously, because that’s the difference between winning and losing.”
Ultimately, that is what the balance of the regular season could become about.
“How to close games, for sure,” Adebayo said. “And then, in my opinion, we definitely have to make it tough on the offense, on not making runs. We’ve got to learn how to manipulate the game at that point and finish the game.”
