With Heat south of .500, Erik Spoelstra acknowledges, 'the urgency is definitely there'

MIAMI — At 6-7 amid this five-day break in their schedule, the Miami Heat find themselves in an all-too-familiar place — chase mode.

A year ago, there was the push back from a 1-4 start. Two years ago, there was a 5-7 start. And in 2021, there was the mediocrity of a 7-5 open.

“And when you’re dealing with a small margin for error throughout this conference, it’s about sustaining whatever your game is, who can sustain longer and more consistently,” coach Erik Spoelstra said, with his team idle until Sunday’s 6 p.m. game against the Dallas Mavericks at Kaseya Center.

“And you watch games, you throw ’em on, there’s just these swings back and forth. You get the sense as long as the teams are playing for playoff spots, that any team can win on any given night in either conference. It’s great for the league, great for the fans. You love it for the competition part of it. And what you want is it brings out the best in your team.”

Not, Spoelstra said, that this is necessarily the path of choice, the Heat’s record easily having been positioned to be 8-5 if not for allowing a final-second put-back basket by the Sacramento Kings or Spoelstra’s overtime blunder of calling a timeout he did not have in last week’s loss to the Detroit Pistons.

Such an 8-5 record would have had the Heat at third in the East entering Wednesday.

“There’s urgency there, for sure,” Spoelstra said of where his team stands. “And if you look at it in both conferences, there’s urgency throughout the conferences. And I think there’s parity. It brings out great competition. It brings out all these different emotions. You win a game, you feel like everything is great. Then you lose a game, you feel like the world is coming down.”

Through the season’s first 13 games, the Heat have been riding such a roller coaster, yet to stack together more than two consecutive victories.

“That’s what competition does, particularly when you’re jostling so competitively in the standings, where there’s a lot of teams bunched up. A couple of wins can change the feeling of things,” Spoelstra said. “But the urgency is definitely there.”

So the perspective at the moment can be of a team that has both won two of its last three, as well as lost five of its last eight.

“The habits that we’re building, we feel like are trending in a solid direction,” Spoelstra said. “And, yes, we would like to turn these habits into wins.”

The two-ways

The Heat’s three two-way players continue to thrive, albeit on two distinct levels.

On Tuesday night, the Heat’s G League affiliate, the Sioux Falls Skyforce, extended its winning streak to three behind the play of two-way players Josh Christopher and Keshad Johnson.

Christopher, the guard who was a 2021 first-round pick of the Houston Rockets, closed the 121-109 victory over the Utah Jazz’s affiliate with 25 points. Johnson, the forward who went undrafted out of Arizona in June, recorded a double-double of 22 points and 12 rebounds while cast as an undersized center.

Then there is guard Dru Smith, who remains with the Heat on his two-way contract.

The third-year NBA veteran is coming off a 10-point, six-rebound effort in sparking the Heat bench in Monday night’s 106-89 victory over the visiting Philadelphia 76ers.

“He just does a lot of things that allow your better players to be who they need to be,” Spoelstra said. “And defensively, he’s a pest. He really is.

“It’s not necessarily about his stats or his scoring. All that stuff he’s getting better at, especially his shooting. But it’s all the intangibles that every team in this league needs and he provides a lot of those.”

Smith’s effort is coming a year removed from last season’s devastating, season-ending knee injury in a road game against the Cleveland Cavaliers.

“Maybe a lot of people don’t know what Dru’s capable of, but I think internally we all know what he’s capable of,” guard Duncan Robinson said of the 26-year-old guard who went undrafted out of Missouri in 2021. “He’s just a winning player, super scrappy, tough, works his tail off, a lot of hours put into becoming a better shooter and play maker.

“The defense speaks for itself, the way he flies around and makes plays.”