The Miami Heat missed out on an important opportunity Sunday as their top-six playoff hopes took a huge hit.
The Heat will attempt to rebound on Tuesday night when they visit the Atlanta Hawks, a club that already knows it will be part of the play-in tournament.
Miami (43-35) is craving an automatic playoff berth in the Eastern Conference and had a chance to move into the sixth position on Sunday before falling 117-115 to the host Indiana Pacers.
A victory would have pushed Miami ahead of the Pacers by a half-game. Instead, Indiana enters play Monday in the coveted sixth spot with the Philadelphia 76ers a half-game behind and the Heat 1 1/2 games back in eighth.
The victory also gave Indiana the head-to-head tiebreaker edge over the Heat.
With just four games remaining, Miami has no margin for error and needs help from other teams. Both the Pacers and 76ers play on Tuesday night.
“When you say that there are games with meaning, that also means there are games with consequences,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said after Sunday’s setback. “For it to have meaning, there’s consequences if you lose. That’s the whole point of all of this right now.”
The game against the Hawks closes Miami’s road slate for the regular season. The Heat host the Dallas Mavericks on Wednesday and the Toronto Raptors for games on Friday and Sunday.
Of course, Miami was part of the play-in round last season and ended up reaching the NBA Finals before losing to the Denver Nuggets. So the path might not be as scary to the Heat as it might be for other clubs.
In fact, Miami star Jimmy Butler isn’t the least bit worried about the task at hand.
“Winning out or not, you just always got to keep that same energy,” Butler said. “You always got to smile, you always got to realize that it’s never as bad as it always seems and we get to hoop for a living.
“Everybody should be smiling, everybody should be having fun and everybody should be enjoying not only playing basketball, but being around one another.”
The Hawks (36-42) will finish either nine or 10th in the East and are battling the Chicago Bulls for homecourt advantage in the play-in round.
Atlanta just completed a two-game road trip in which it lost 109-95 to the Mavericks and 142-110 to the Nuggets. The Hawks won six of their previous seven games.
In the loss to Denver on Sunday, Atlanta watched the Nuggets make a season-best 23 3-pointers with an overall shooting percentage of 60.2.
“Defensively, there’s some breakdowns that you just can’t afford to have,” Hawks coach Quin Snyder said afterward. “Someone comes off a screen and handoff and you’re behind them and you have to switch that in an emergency situation and get a contest and (Michael) Porter might still make it but he’ll make it less frequently. And that still might not be enough if you don’t do some of those other things in a breakdown situation.”
Six Hawks scored in double digits against Denver but nobody reached 20. Clint Capela had the best all-around game with 19 points and 12 rebounds. He was 5-of-6 from the field and 9-of-12 from the free-throw line.
Dejounte Murray was just 4-of-15 shooting for 14 points but did contribute 12 assists.
The Heat are 2-1 against the Hawks this season but Atlanta won the most recent meeting, 109-108 on Jan. 19 in Miami. Murray drained the decisive 3-pointer with two seconds left.
The Hawks announced Monday that star guard Trae Young was cleared to rejoin his teammates at practice six weeks after finger surgery. He will not be ready to play Tuesday.
–Field Level Media