A second-half surge from Karl-Anthony Towns and the New York Knicks propelled them to a 116-107 win over the Miami Heat inside Kaseya Center Wednesday night.
Towns led the Knicks with 44 points on 17-of-25 shooting and 4-of-5 from 3-point range. He also hauled-in a game-high 13 rebounds with two assists in 39 minutes. Jalen Brunson had 18 of his 22 points in the second half, converting on six of his 18 field goal attempts with nine assists.
New York outscored the Heat 64-49 in the second half, including 35-22 in the third quarter, where the Heat continues to have struggles; entering Wednesday, they have posted a league-worst minus-40.5 (!!!!) NET Rating in the third.
The story of the night for the Heat was Tyler Herro, who dominated offensively with 34 points, five rebounds and seven assists on 12-of-20 shooting and 8-of-13 from 3-point range. There weren’t many positives thereafter.
Jimmy Butler and Bam Adebayo did not have a strong impact in the losing effort. Butler scored 15 points with four rebounds and two steals on 6-of-9 shooting while Adebayo tallied just 11 points and four rebounds in 33 minutes. The latter’s impact was nullified by Towns throughout the evening.
Spoelstra went nine-deep without much production from the bench. Jaime Jaquez Jr. got out to a strong start, but finished with eight points, eight rebounds and four assists; Dru Smith saw 16 minutes of action with two points, three blocks (strips) and four boards; Duncan Robinson’s struggles from beyond the arc continued, missing four of his five long-range attempts.
Miami’s struggles against good teams continued. New York entered the evening with one of the NBA’s worst defenses through the early portion of the season, yet the Heat posted a 112.6 offensive rating (57th percentile); New York, for perspective, placed in the 86th percentile or better in effective field goal percentage (59.8; 86th), offensive rating (123.4; 88th) and halfcourt offensive rating (117.5; 98th), per Cleaning The Glass.
That’s an ideal recipe if the team’s best players don’t play as expected–which is what all of this comes down to in the end. The Heat won’t win many games if their best players don’t consistently show up–especially when the game calls for it.
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Until/unless something changes for the better, we are an average team, usually able to beat bad teams, even on bad days and occasionally unable to beat good teams, even on good days. Heat are definitely NOT a great rebounding team. What’s going on with the turd quarters. Spo needs to work on his halftime motivational speech cuz the one he’s using ain’t working.
I’m not a proctologist, but…I can clearly see there is a big hole in the defense in the front court. WTF is going on with the free throws? We were one of the top FT shooting teams in the league.
More questions than answers. If things don’t look better in the next few weeks, Pat and Spo may need to have their “come to Jesus moment” regarding the future direction of the team.
Team and individual stats tell us a lot about what is going wrong so far. See below.
https://basketball.realgm.com/nba/teams/Miami-Heat/15/stats
This one made me sad. I kept thinking we were gonna see a run there at the end, but it never happened. Now we gotta wait until Saturday for more Heat.
This one hurts. We are healthy and because of that we can get a better gauge of where we stand as a team. After four games, it is looking like we are very similar in collective strength as we were last year, which is to be somewhat expected. The only change, Ware, is not a factor as yet.
Again, like I said on the game thread, we have four very good players, but no superstar to carry us, and a lot of varying degrees of decent role players. We need one more very good player, especially at a position of need. Ware could become that player, but it will probably take some time, maybe all year, till he gets there.
It’s not as much the rotations, although I would like to see more Ware, it’s more the talent level. It’s a collective strength sport, where each player has their moments in games or between them where they are on or off. The very good players just have more of those effective moments, either offensively or on defense. And, as the game goes on, it gets harder to score and by the end of the game, usually only the very good to great players are scoring.
So, we need a trade, or Ware to emerge, or we are looking pretty play in-ish after four. I wish we could do something to improve. I think it’s pretty clear now we need it.
I agree with most of what you said and we definitely do need to make a trade for major improvement. I disagree with you about the Rotations though because that was one of the reasons we lost. We have a middling to weak bench. Add to the fact, we have the slowest pace in league, worst 3rd quarter scoring, last in rebounding, and no go to superstar. So bench scoring is important and Rotations need to be fixed. Until love comes back, ware should get bryant minutes, even if some say he’s not ready I believe he would be better in those minutes because of length and defense. Kat would be under 30 with ware guarding him, also Hart was outhustling Bryant for rebounds. I’ll give him credit though had a good first half. Also Duncan should be in back of the Rotation fighting for minutes with Burks. There is no reason for our 2nd best perimeter defender to not get any minutes. In My opinion until love and jrich come back, the bench unit should be Jaques, locksmith, ware, and 9th spot should be a match up based preference between dunc,burks,and dru…. because spo rarely runs a 10 man lineup.
Alright now this one really got to me