MIAMI — The best coaches are part-psychologist when the time demands. They understand that attributes like self-confidence and motivation start in the brain. That how you practice is important, but how you think is more so.
Jimmy Johnson while coaching the Miami Hurricanes used to lay a long two-by-four inch strip of wood across a carpeted floor and ask his players to walk across it, tightrope-style. They did so without hesitation, with ease. Then he would ask: What would you do if that exact same strip of wood was laid across a canyon, with no safety net below?
The exercise was getting the mind to focus so sharply on the task at hand that it could be compartmentalized, made more digestible, less daunting.
Erik Spoelstra, go to work.
Get your players to believe when the reasons to seem closer to make-believe.
The Miami Heat could quit right now, mentally. Pack it up, pack it in.
It would be the easiest thing to do.
And I think they might. They stand at a precipice. This has not been a special team or season. Something is missing from the Heat’s DNA. How does a team with three 20-point scorers for the first time in club history somehow finish last in the NBA in team offense?
I doubt this Heat team has the sufficient resolve or the will to summon it from here.
I hope they prove me wrong.
Let’s not sugarcoat that this was a disappointing regular season. After last year being the No. 1 seed in the East and coming one Game 7 miss from reaching the NBA Finals, they digressed to be a pretty average team stuck in the play-in round.
Tuesday the Heat became the first No. 7 seed in the five years of play-ins to lose at home, getting steamrolled — embarrassed, frankly — by the Atlanta Hawks, 116-105.
Now, Friday, they face a tougher challenge: A must-win game against Wednesday night’s Toronto-Chicago play-in winner to eke out the No. 8 seed. (Miami was a combined 1-6 against those two this season.)
And the prize if they advance? The top seed Milwaukee Bucks in the first round. The Bucks led by Giannis Antetokounmpo. The Bucks who swept Miami out of the 2021 playoffs 4-0. The Bucks who this season won both games against the Heat that Antetokounmpo played in, by a combined 37 points.
For the Heat, that two-by-four board isn’t laid on a carpet anymore. It’s spanning a small canyon.
“At least we have a lot of experience,” Spoelstra said after Tuesday’s dispiriting loss. “We’ve had a lot of ups and downs. Nothing about this season has been easy, so we’re going to do this the hard way. We’re going to get back to work, regroup, put our arms around each other, get to the film and get better from this.”
They cannot get any worse.
The 11-point loss-margin flattered Miami’s performance and effort. The defeat was wire-to-wire. The Hawks dominated 63-39 in rebounding, in second chances … in everything. The Heat got 33 off the bench from Kyle Lowry, but his teammates were bystanders. The rest of the team shot 37%.
I bumped into Heat play-by-play announcer Eric Reid in the bowels of the arena after Tuesday’s game and we literally both stood shaking our heads, nearly in disbelief over the stunningly lackluster performance we’d just seen. That the Heat was capable of being that flat and that bad, at home, with stakes so big.
What would the Heat have to do to rebound from Tuesday’s mess and triumph on Friday? “We’d have to stay confident,” Jimmy Butler began in the post-mortem.
“We have to know we are capable of winning if we start out the right way and if we rebound, obviously. But it’s just, I don’t know, shots don’t go in, we foul — that’s never the recipe for success with us. So come Friday, we’ve got to play, like, legit, the exact opposite that we played tonight.”
Butler called his team’s rebounding “horrendous.”
Spoelstra called the lack of it “absolutely crippling” and “a comedy of errors.”
Said Tyler Herro: “They beat the hell out of us on the glass, so it wasn’t even close. So we can point fingers, do whatever — at the end of the day, they beat the hell out of us on the boards, and that’s what it is.”
There is a game left for Miami, at least one, but Tuesday made this season feel done.
For it to survive Friday and have any hope beyond that, the Heat must suddenly start to show an ability to be what they haven’t been all season:
Special.
