After the Miami Heat lost in brutal fashion to the Orlando Magic in the opener, 116-97, the team will be scrambling to pinpoint the issues needing to be corrected before Saturday’s game against the Charlotte Hornets. While the Heat look to find the culprit, one suspect was their lack of defensive intensity that was addressed during Friday’s practice.
The same sentiments were echoed after Wednesday’s opener and even beyond reflection, Miami head coach Erik Spoelstra stayed true to his original assessment. Speaking to the media Friday, he would use the magic word in “active” to describe what his team lacked against Orlando according to David Wilson of The Miami Herald.
“It just wasn’t one of our more active or big-disposition games,” Spoelstra said Friday. “That stayed true throughout all of the analysis, whether we were looking at the film, our gut feel, the analytics to it.”
“We pride ourselves on that side of the floor,” Spoelstra continued. “We have to be better.”
In the Heat’s loss against the in-state rival in the Magic, things started to take a turn for the worse in the third quarter where they were getting pummeled on offense by the opponent’s elite defense while being unable to gain the physical advantage on defense. Orlando would end scoring a monstrous 39 points in the third period that opened up the game where at one point, they led by as much as 28 points.
Physicality is the biggest aspect Heat need to stress in foreseeable future
The Magic finished shooting 66.7 percent from the field and 50 percent from deep in the period where as the Heat had their worst quarter scoring 18 points on 26.3 percent shooting from the field and 30.8 percent from three-point range. Miami’s defense fell apart in the second half where Spoelstra said that it goes far beyond wanting steals and deflections, it is more about the physical nature.
“You want them to feel you,” Spoelstra said. “It’s not necessarily going to be the metrics, or steals or deflections every single time. It’s more about doing tough things, being physical, getting teams out of what they typically want to do at every point of attack that we’re there, and that wasn’t the case.”
Throughout the preseason, Miami had at least 15 steals in every preseason game and tons of deflections, but Wednesday had the team only recording five steals and nine deflections. The Heat also got out-rebounded 57-41 as there was few positives leading to the team not playing to their strengths.
Heat’s Jaime Jaquez Jr. on what they have to do to be the “No. 1 defense”
Jaime Jaquez Jr. led the bench with 13 points to go along with five rebounds and three assists as he spoke heavily on the attention of detail that was missing from the group.
“To be a No. 1 defense, that’s what you have to do,” Jaquez said. “As an organization, as a team, that’s what we strive to do, being able to do all those things. They’re very hard to do. No one’s saying they’re easy.”
Despite the first game disappointment, Jaquez is confident in the team getting back to their strengths as they focused this heavily during the offseason, training camp, and preseason.
“Early on, it should be pretty easy,” Jaquez said. “We had a month of training camp, first game, so coming back in today we just wanted to work on what we know we need to get better as a team.”
Right after the game, it was a huge takeaway for the Heat that the “activity level” wasn’t there as it was present in the weeks prior as mentioned by Spoelstra.
“No, the activity level wasn’t there,” Spoelstra said. “You don’t need stats to see it, like you can feel it when we’re active. It might not lead to steals, but, yeah, what we’ve felt the last two, three weeks, we didn’t feel that tonight.”
Heat were “overwhelmed” in opener, looking to bounce back Saturday
Magic star Paolo Banchero would have a sensational night scoring 33 points to go along with 11 rebounds as Spoelstra would mention his performance and how the opponent’s as a whole “overwhelmed” them.
“They just absolutely overwhelmed us off our misses first I thought we started the half getting okay looks,” Spoelstra said. “Four of the looks were from three, but those were the appropriate looks. This team really protects the pain and the rim, we knock down two or three of those maybe give them to blink a little bit, but we missed those, and then they’re just running it down our gut. From that point, it became either transition offense, rebounding or matchup based where they just attacked us in off of some of those matchups.”
“Banchero was great tonight, that’s an understatement,” Spoelstra continued. “But he forced a lot of different things out of our defense, and we need to shore that up, and we will get better with that. And offensively, you know, we have to trust some of the things that we’ve been working on. You know, in preseason, it’s looked a lot different than this. Obviously, that’s a very good defense. That’s a tough five defense. They’re very active, long so you have to trust, you know, what we do even more.”
At any rate, the Heat start the season 0-1 and look to get one in the win column Saturday when they go on the road and face the Charlotte Hornets.
