How Heat facing 'a little stress' can fuel end of season push

03/11/2025 05:07 PM

MIAMI – After another Miami Heat collapse Monday night to the Charlotte Hornets which marks another game the team lost a double-digit lead, there is no doubt a lot of stress on the team to turn it around. However, the Heat remain confident and even believe that stress is not necessarily a bad thing.

The talk about this stress was mentioned several times after Tuesday’s practice, first by the team’s captain in Bam Adebayo, who spoke to the media about the state of the team after the 17th time this season they blew a double-digit lead. He would emphasize how it’s “ok to have a little stress” and goes into how much it matters more to the group.

“It’s ok to have a little stress,” Adebayo said. “You start to enjoy it more when you realize you lose 4 straight, but then you come out of this and win four out of five, five out of six. You realize how much that stress actually helps you. Because it pushes you in a deseparate situation where, like every close out, every defensive assignment, every stop, you realize how much it matters to win."

Heat’s Erik Spoelstra on the “beauty in the struggle”

Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra would admit the team has regressed after Saturday’s defeat to the Chicago Bulls, but to make matters worse, the team lost a double-digit lead once again to the Hornets on Monday. However, Spoelstra would say Tuesday aftenoon that there is “beauty in the struggle” and would echo the same sentiments as Adebayo about their stress levels.

“There’s nothing wrong with a little bit of stress in our lives,” Spoelstra said. “We got a lot of good things going for us to be able to be in this profession around each other. But there is a beauty in the grind, beauty in the struggle, if we just keep on forging ahead. I do believe that there’s something beautiful on the other side.”

Erik Spoelstra on how Heat should “embrace the competition”

The Heat are looking to get better minutes from Andrew Wiggins among other integral players along Adebayo and Tyler Herro to help finish off these teams, especially when they have big leads. Still, Miami has been in a bevy of close, competitive games, especially in clutch time with five minutes left to go in the contest.

Spoelstra would say that his team should “embrace the competition” as these are games that players prepare for in the offseason and would even say that “some of these you just can’t even explain.”

“You got to embrace the competition, embrace, like, how competitive these games are. When they’re preparing in July and August, you know, they’re not preparing for blowout games either direction. You’re preparing for these moments of pressure and context of games where there’s meaning to it. So you can’t have it both ways. You can’t have it where the game doesn’t mean anything, and play well.”

“I mean, to have those kind of moments where it is exhilarating, when you do get a win, there also has to be a consequence of feeling like you don’t,” Spoelstra continued. “And there’s a deeper feeling right now with this, the locker room really cares. Some of these games you just can’t even explain. Get to work and try to fix it, the things that are obvious and there’s things that have just happened.”

At any rate, the Heat looks to turn it around starting Wednesday when the team takes on the Los Angeles Clippers as they are 29-35 which puts them ninth in the Eastern Conference.

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