Five takeaways from the Miami Heat’s 121-110 win over the Detroit Pistons on Sunday night at Kaseya Center to open a four-game homestand. The Heat (36-29) continues the homestand on Tuesday against the Washington Wizards:
The Heat extended its winning streak to five games, continuing its late-season surge with another quality win behind the leading duo of Bam Adebayo and Tyler Herro.
On Friday, the Heat ended the Charlotte Hornets’ six-game winning streak with an impressive road win over the hottest team in the league. Charlotte was 19-6 in its previous 25 games before falling to Miami.
On Sunday, the Heat earned an 11-point win over the Eastern Conference-leading Pistons. Detroit is in the middle of a rough patch with four straight losses, but still holds the East’s top record at 45-18.
“You can sense that our locker room is trying to seize the moment right now,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said following Sunday’s victory. “We’re having a lot of fun competing with each other and playing to a consistent identity on both ends. So that was a cap to a pretty strong week.”
The Heat set the tone from the start, dominating the first quarter to outscore the Pistons 34-16 in the period. Detroit shot just 6 of 22 (27.3 percent) from the field and 1 of 9 (11.1 percent) on threes in the period for its lowest scoring first quarter of the season.
The Heat continued to punish the Pistons in the second quarter, pulling ahead by as many as 25 points before entering halftime ahead 67-48. The 25-point deficit marked Detroit’s largest first-half deficit this season.
The Heat never looked back, extending its lead up to 29 points while leading by double digits for the entire second half.
It’s worth noting that the Pistons faced some tough scheduling on Sunday, playing on the second night of a back-to-back after falling to the Brooklyn Nets in Detroit on Saturday night. Along with a three-hour flight that got the Pistons to Miami on early Sunday morning, they also lost an hour with the clocks springing forward for daylight saving time.
“Obviously, we have our motivations, what we’re trying to do.,” Spoelstra said. “Detroit has had their season. That’ll make everybody excited to compete against them.
Adebayo and Herro were the catalysts behind the Heat’s dominant performance on Sunday.
Herro closed with a team-high 25 points on 8-of-16 shooting from the field, 4-of-8 shooting on threes and 5-of-6 shooting from the foul line to go with six rebounds and three assists in 30 minutes.
Adebayo finished with 24 points on 7-of-17 shooting from the field, 4-of-10 shooting on threes and 6-of-6 shooting from the foul line, nine rebounds, six assists, one steal and one block in 34 minutes. Along the way, Adebayo scored his 10,000th career point on Sunday to join Dwyane Wade as the only Heat players to ever reach that milestone with the franchise.
“That’s a lot of buckets,” Adebayo said of reaching 10,000 points. “It means a lot, coming from somebody who got drafted to play defense, and everybody thinking I was just a lob threat. But it just shows the growth of my game.”
Cade Cunningham recorded a game-high 26 points and 10 assists for the Pistons. Jalen Duren added 24 points on 10-of-12 shooting from the field.
But besides Cunningham and Duren, the rest of the Pistons’ roster combined to score just 60 points on 21-of-60 (35 percent) shooting from the field.
In his second game back in Miami since leaving the Heat this past offseason, Duncan Robinson scored just three points on 1-of-7 shooting from three-point range for the Pistons.
The Heat, which entered Sunday with the NBA’s fourth-best defensive rating this season, limited the Pistons to 44.4 percent shooting from the field and 11 of 37 (29.7 percent) shooting on threes.
“Let’s keep handling our business on the defensive end,” Adebayo said. “That’s why we’re really winning games. We’re getting stops and running in transition, and it makes our offense easier.”
The Heat played without two starters for the second straight game, and again won.
The Heat was without starters Norman Powell (right groin strain) and Andrew Wiggins (left big toe inflammation) for the second consecutive game. Powell missed fifth straight game with his injury and Wiggins missed his second straight game.
Wiggins sat out Friday’s win over the Hornets because of knee tendinitis, but was listed as out on Sunday due to a toe injury. The Heat clarified before Sunday’s game that Wiggins is still dealing with knee tendinitis, but the toe issue (Spoelstra made clear it’s not turf toe) is what kept him sidelined on Sunday.
“He’s dealing with both things right now that we think we can clear up in the short term,” Spoelstra said when asked about Wiggins on Sunday. “And we’ll just see. He’s getting a lot of treatment, so that’s definitely helping him and he’s making some progress.”
Powell was listed by the Heat as “week to week” after an MRI on Feb. 27 revealed a Grade 1 groin strain. This past Friday marked the one-week mark from that MRI.
“He’s definitely been able to do more,” Spoelstra said Sunday when asked for an update on Powell. “… Again, I think we shut him down at a responsible time to be able to try to fast track this. But I don’t have an update on his timeline, but he definitely is doing more.”
Along with missing Powell and Wiggins, the Heat was without Simone Fontecchio (left groin strain), Keshad Johnson (G League), Nikola Jovic (low back injury management) and Terry Rozier (not with team) against the Pistons.
The Pistons were without two rotation players in Caris LeVert (left wrist sprain) and Ausar Thompson (right ankle sprain) against the Heat.
The absences of Powell and Wiggins left the Heat again starting undrafted rookie forward Myron Gardner.
The Heat opened Sunday’s game with a starting lineup Davion Mitchell, Herro, Gardner, Pelle Larsson and Adebayo.
It marked Gardner’s second straight start amid the Heat’s injury issues and just the sixth start of his NBA career.
Gardner, who was born and raised in Detroit, totaled four points, five rebounds and two assists in 16 minutes against his hometown team.
The Heat’s starting group helped set the tone early, too, building a 15-8 lead over the Pistons before Spoelstra turned to the bench for the first time on Sunday.
Gardner, 24, finished the win with a plus/minus of plus 9.
But it was the Heat’s bench that turned into one of the big stories of Sunday’s game.
Even with a chunk of its usual rotation out, the Heat’s depth was still on display.
With Miami using a bench rotation of Kel’el Ware, Jaime Jaquez Jr., Kasparas Jakucionis and Dru Smith, the Heat’s bench outscored the Pistons’ reserves 24-9 in the first half and 34-21 through the first three quarters on the way to finishing Sunday’s win with an 50-46 bench edge. The Pistons’ reserves closed the gap in the final minutes, with the Heat already well in control.
Three Heat reserves finished with double-digit points.
Jaquez recorded 19 points, five rebounds and seven assists in 29 minutes. He has now scored at least 14 points off the bench in six straight games.
Ware finished with 12 points, five rebounds, two steals and two blocks. He was a plus 11 in 26 minutes.
Jakucionis contributed 12 points on 5-of-8 shooting from the field and 2-of-3 shooting on threes, three rebounds and one steal in 22 minutes. He’s now shooting an impressive 43.9 percent on 2.8 three-point attempts per game during his rookie season.
The Heat will spend the next week in Miami trying to win more games to get out of play-in tournament territory.
With Sunday marking the start of a four-game homestand that includes matchups against the Wizards on Tuesday, Milwaukee Bucks on Thursday and Orlando Magic on Saturday, this is an important week for the Heat to take advantage of in its push to escape the NBA’s play-in tournament.
Following this four-game homestand, eight of the Heat’s final 14 regular-season games will be on the road.
Even after the Heat’s win on Sunday, it remained in seventh place in the East with the Magic also defeating the Bucks. The Heat (36-29) closed Sunday percentage points behind the sixth-place Magic (35-28) and one game behind the fifth-place Toronto Raptors (36-27).
But the Heat did extend its lead over the idle eighth-place Philadelphia 76ers (34-29) to one game.
The NBA’s play-in tournament features the seventh-through-10th-place teams competing for the final two playoff seeds in each conference. The Heat needs to finish among the East’s top six teams to clinch a playoff spot without needing to take part in the play-in tournament.
“It’s not a secret what we’re trying to do,” Spoelstra said, referring to the team’s goal of avoiding the play-in. “We got to win games. You got to do it one at a time.”