The Miami Heat head into tonight’s home game with the Indiana Pacers coming off their first loss of this young NBA season. The Atlanta Hawks got the better of the South Beach Bandits on Monday night, so even after starting the season 5-0 the curtain has now been officially pulled exposing the fact that the Heat aren’t really that good anymore afterall. Or something like that, according to the knee-jerk reaction of all people who desperately hope that Miami isn’t actually as refocused and improved as they really do appear to look thus far.
It was only an eight point loss (100-92) to a team in the Hawks who while Miami is certainly way better than, is still a playoff team for sure out East. Even without Jamal Crawford. Regardless though, a loss is a loss, so afterwards Dwayne Wade was compelled by the groundswell of media still following this team’s every move to talk about it.
Even though he did have a game high 10 assists, Wade did also have a pretty rough night from the field. He went 4 of 17 from the floor for his 12 points, turned it over 3 times, and finished with a plus / minus of -7; fifteen points worse than Mario Chalmers (+8).
The following is what Wade had to say after the game about all that, according to Ira Winderman of the Sun Sentinel:
“I just had a bad game,” he said. “There’s going to be a lot of back-to-backs; there’s going to be a lot of struggles. This is the NBA. I’ll bounce back like I’ve always done my whole career.
“I’m not going to shoot it great every night. But, obviously, as a player you’re always frustrated when the ball’s not going in the basket when you’re shooting the ball the same way.”
More than just Wade having a bad game shooting though, this one struck fear into the hearts of Drake, DJ Kahled, and all nine of the other Miami Heat season ticket holders because it appeared at times that this year’s version of the Heat reverted back to Heatle-like tendencies from a season ago with everybody trying to do their own thing out there. Something Wade kinda said they didn’t do, but also kinda didn’t dismiss either.
“I don’t know if we did too much of it, kind of like we did last year, or not,” he said.
“I thought we got some good shots,” he said. “I thought at times we had to use our ability to try to break them down.
“They did a good job of guarding the rim, but I thought that we got the shots that we wanted to get. Obviously, we didn’t make them all. They got some blocks at the rim.”
Defending the rim particularly well is basically the only way you can beat this Miami Heat team right now, assuming they don’t beat themselves. LeBron James has attempted only one three pointer all season, and as a result he’s averaging over 29 points per game on sixty percent shooting from the field. Wade has only taken one three pointer thus far himself as well.
The fact that those two guys have come out determined to finish at the rim is a good thing overall for this Heat team. They might be the two most prolific finishers in the League. A side effect of that though is that Miami is only averaging 10.2 three point attempts per game this season, making only an average of 4.3 per night. Somebody will eventually need to hit a couple more of those in order to help keep those driving lanes open as much as possible.
For now though, that’s about it as far as things to worry about down in Miami. It was only one loss, and Dwayne Wade is right, he’s not going to shoot it like that every night.
