Miami Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra and assistant coach Chris Quinn look from the bench during overtime against the Milwaukee Bucks at Kaseya Center in Miami on April 5, 2025. David Santiago [email protected]
With only one week left in the regular season, the Miami Heat is dealing with two big problems.
One, the Heat continues to struggle to keep leads and finish games.
Two, injuries continue to weaken the Heat’s roster.
Both problems made an appearance in Saturday night’s costly 121-115 overtime loss to the Milwaukee Bucks at Kaseya Center.
The Heat entered without three rotation players in Tyler Herro (right thigh contusion), Nikola Jovic (broken right hand) and Andrew Wiggins (right hamstring tendinopathy) and lost Saturday despite leading by seven points with 3:04 left in the fourth quarter.
“I love the way our team is playing. I love the way we’re competing, I love not making excuses for guys out,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said defiantly after the defeat. “This is a hard-nose team right now and we just have to stay the course. Nothing has really dramatically changed. We want to win as many as we can going down the stretch. But, yeah, obviously this was a tough one.”
A tough one following another tough one, as the Heat also lost to the Memphis Grizzlies by two points Thursday on a game-winning buzzer-beater from Ja Morant. This two-game skid comes at a bad time for the Heat, as it battles for positioning in the NBA’s play-in tournament that features the seventh-through-10th-place teams competing for the final two playoff seeds in each conference.
The Heat, which is already locked into the play-in tourney for the third straight season, is facing the real possibility of having to win two straight play-in games just to make the playoffs.
The Heat (35-43) entered Sunday in 10th place in the East — one-half game behind the ninth-place Chicago Bulls (35-42), 1.5 games behind the eighth-place Atlanta Hawks (36-41) and three games behind the seventh-place Orlando Magic (38-40). With just four games left to play this regular season, including Wednesday’s showdown against the Bulls in Chicago, the Heat needs to win out and get some help to have a chance of getting a better position in the play-in tourney.
If the Heat finishes the regular season in ninth or 10th place, it would need to win two straight games in the play-in tournament just to qualify for the playoffs as the East’s No. 8 seed. Closing the regular season in seventh or eighth place means the Heat would get two chances to win one play-in game to make the playoffs as either the East’s No. 7 or No. 8 seed.
“Just because it’s not exactly where you want to be in the standings doesn’t mean that you have to think that we’re less than because of where we think we should be,” Spoelstra said, with the Heat closing its three-game homestand on Monday against the struggling and injury-depleted Philadelphia 76ers (7:30 p.m., FanDuel Sports Network Sun). “These games have a great feel to them. They’re competitive. And if you’re a competitor, then this is what you want, this is what you live for.”
But the Heat also wants to get some of its best players back from injury.
The good news for the Heat is that Wiggins has been upgraded to questionable for Monday’s matchup against the 76ers after missing the last five games with his hamstring injury. He said after Saturday’s defeat that “hopefully in the next couple games I can find my way back on the court.”
The last game Wiggins played came in the Heat’s March 27 home win over the Atlanta Hawks, but the injury didn’t happen in that contest. Instead, Wiggins said it was “lingering a little bit” before then.
“It has definitely been frustrating just because I want to be out there playing with the guys and just fighting. I feel like this is a newer thing for me,” Wiggins said. “I feel like usually I play a lot of games throughout the season. Being hurt sucks. But we have a great training staff here, great physical therapy guys here. So they’re just getting me right.”
Wiggins, 30, missed his 13th game because of injury or illness on Saturday after being traded to the Heat on Feb. 6 as part of the Jimmy Butler trade. Wiggins missed one game due to a stomach illness, five games due to a sprained right ankle, two games due to a left lower leg contusion and now five straight games due to a hamstring issue.
When Wiggins has been available since the February trade, he has been one of the Heat’s top players. He has averaged 19.9 points, 4.1 rebounds, 3.2 assists and 1.1 steals per game in his first 15 appearances (all starts) with the Heat.
“I don’t think it’s a major setback just because I’m able to watch and observe the team and kind of have a view of what’s going on,” Wiggins said of his hamstring issue. “I feel like when I come back, I’ve been putting in a lot of work with what I can do.”
As for Herro, he missed his first game on Saturday after being kneed in the thigh late in Thursday’s loss to the Grizzlies and he’s questionable for Monday’s game against the 76ers. Herro has missed just four of the team’s first 78 games this season, with the Heat labeling him as “day to day.”
And Jovic missed his 23rd straight game on Saturday after breaking his right hand in late February. He was cleared to resume work on the basketball court in late March, but has again been ruled out for Monday’s matchup against the 76ers.
In addition, the Heat listed Haywood Highsmith (left Achilles soreness) and Alec Burks (lower back discomfort) as questionable for Monday’s game.
But along with missing Jovic, the Heat will be without Kevin Love (personal reasons), Dru Smith (left Achilles surgery) and Isaiah Stevens (right foot discomfort).
“You’re talking about Niko being out, Wiggs being out, Tyler being out and our guys are not going to give up any inch of ground,” Spoelstra said after Saturday’s competitive overtime loss that included 12 lead changes and 15 ties.
But in the end, the Heat wasted another late lead on Saturday.
The Heat has now blown a double-digit lead in an NBA-high 21 losses and blown an NBA-high 20 fourth-quarter leads in losses this season.
“We’re going through adversity, we’ve been through it before,” Heat guard Davion Mitchell said, with the team also enduring a miserable 10-game losing skid last month. “I think it’s good for us, especially with the postseason coming up. You know there are going to be close games and we’ve been through the fire before. So this is a good loss for us, honestly. We’re going to learn from it and we’re going to keep going.”
The Heat just doesn’t have much room for error, as it hopes to get healthier and hold on to more leads before time runs out.
“You go out there and try to win out,” Adebayo said of the Heat’s mentality entering the final week of the regular season. “That’s the biggest thing — win.”
This story was originally published April 6, 2025 at 11:51 AM.
