It’s the final month of the NBA season and the Miami Heat are up to their old tricks. Only, it’s difficult to know what trick, exactly, they’re trying to pull.
Even for this motley and unpredictable crew, this affair of winning 11 of 14 but then three straight losses, including one egg, against the deeply unserious Wizards is a new addition to their bag of tricks.
Never let them know your next move? Play possum? No one knows, but maybe that stench isn’t that of an unfed rabbit that’s been hiding in a hat for five months. Maybe the heat stinks.
Subtract the streaks of nine wins in 11 games and 11 wins in 14 games from the resume and the Heat are 15-24 this season. Their point differential this season is closer to the Houston Rockets than the Orlando Magic.
Is this a fair way to evaluate a Heat team that advanced to the Finals as the eighth seed last season? I don’t know. Know. Trying to understand the Heat is like being in the pods Love is blind. Every time you think you know who they are, they show a different side of themselves (and that side doesn’t always look like Megan Fox).
What I do know is that the Heat have lost three in a row and are in danger of making it four when the defending champion Denver Nuggets come to the Kaseya Center on Wednesday night. Players and coaches aren’t panicked or desperate like they were during their seven-game losing streak in January, but they are worried.
“This game is just humbling,” Jimmy Butler said after Sunday night’s disaster. “If you don’t go at it with the right mindset, that’s what will happen and will continue to happen.”
Delving deeper, there are tangible things the Heat’s star players can do to stabilize things down the stretch. To analyze this, we will return to a classic Stock Watch framework. Here are two players whose stock is up and one whose stock is down.
