Jimmy Butler’s fourth-quarter takeover pushes Heat past Pistons. Takeaways and details

Five takeaways from the Miami Heat’s 118-105 win over the Detroit Pistons (16-63) on Tuesday night at Little Caesars Arena to open a three-game trip. The Heat (42-37) continues its final trip of the regular season on Thursday against the Philadelphia 76ers:

The Heat struggled to pull away from the team with the NBA’s worst record ... until Jimmy Butler’s fourth-quarter takeover.

The Heat entered as a 14-point betting favorite against a struggling Pistons team that entered with just one win since the mid-February All-Star break.

Not only does Detroit own the NBA’s worst record, but the the Pistons also were without most of their top players. Detroit was missing Marvin Bagley III, Bojan Bogdanovic, Alec Burks, Cade Cunningham, Hamidou Diallo, Rodney McGruder and Isaiah Stewart because of injuries.

The game still came down to the final minutes, with Butler needing to take over late to deliver the win and send the Pistons to their 21st loss in the past 22 games.

“You have to earn things in this league,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said. “You can’t just assume that it’s going to be easy and our guys didn’t assume it. We had to fight for this one and I thought there was an appropriate amount of urgency throughout the course of the game. They just played well and you have to give them credit for that.”

The Pistons led by three points with 5:36 remaining in the fourth quarter, but the Heat closed the game on a 22-6 run on its way to the win.

Butler scored 16 of the Heat’s 22 points during this game-deciding run on 6-of-6 shooting from the field and 4-of-4 shooting from the foul line.

Butler totaled 18 points in the fourth quarter on the way to finishing the victory with a team-high 27 points on 9-of-12 shooting from the field and 9-of-11 shooting from the foul line to go with eight rebounds, eight assists and four steals. It’s tied for the third-most points Butler has scored in a single fourth quarter during his NBA career and the most points he has scored in a single fourth quarter as a member of the Heat.

“As a closer, he’s going to make so many of those kinds of winning plays,” Spoelstra said of Butler.

Before Butler’s late-game heroics, it was a competitive game between the Heat and the lowly Pistons. The contest included 23 lead changes and 10 ties.

The Heat led by as many as 17 points in the first half, but the Pistons cut the deficit to just seven entering halftime behind a 13-3 run to close the second quarter.

The Pistons continued their run after halftime, opening the third quarter on an 8-0 run to take a one-point lead over the Heat.

The Heat had a strong response, scoring 13 unanswered points to retake the lead and pull ahead by 12 points with 6:13 left in the third quarter.

The Pistons didn’t go away, though.

Detroit closed the third quarter on a 20-7 run to cut the deficit to just one point entering the final period. Pistons guard Killian Hayes then hit the first basket of the fourth quarter to put the Heat in a one-point hole just seconds into the period.

The Pistons led by as many as three points in the fourth quarter before Butler took full control of the game to seal the win for the Heat.

“We won. That’s all that matters,” Butler said. “As long as we win, I don’t care how we do it. I don’t care who scores, I don’t care who’s rebounding the basketball. We just need to win as a unit.”

In addition to Butler’s big game, Heat guard Gabe Vincent scored 22 points on 6-of-11 shooting from three-point range. The six made threes represent a new season-high for Vincent.

Tyler Herro contributed 18 points on 7-of-16 shooting from the field and 2-of-7 shooting on threes, five rebounds and two assists.

“The biggest thing is we got the win and we’ll just keep taking it game by game,” Heat starting center Bam Adebayo said. “We were successful tonight, we got the win. JB held it down in the fourth and everybody else played their part.”

The Heat went with a new starting lineup with less than a week remaining in the regular season.

Even with Adebayo returning from a hip contusion that forced him to miss Saturday’s win over the Dallas Mavericks, the Heat still kept forward Max Strus in the starting lineup over forward Kevin Love for Tuesday’s game in Detroit.

Love made his second straight appearance off the bench after starting in his first 17 games with the Heat and Strus made his second straight start in Love’s place.

The Heat began Tuesday’s contest with a lineup of Vincent, Herro, Strus, Butler and Adebayo. It marked only the second time this season that the Heat has opened a game with this lineup, but this five-man combination has produced positive results together as it entered Tuesday’s start outscoring teams by 16.6 points per 100 possessions in 48 minutes together this season.

The results weren’t as positive in Detroit. The Heat’s new starting lineup was outscored by five points in 15 minutes together.

While Strus has not started many games recently, the Heat’s injury issues throughout the season have lifted him into a starting role for a chunk of the schedule. Strus closed his 30th start of the season on Tuesday with nine points on 3-of-10 shooting from the field and 2-of-8 shooting from beyond the arc, three rebounds and two assists in 29 minutes.

In an ideal world, the Heat would not be making a change to its starting lineup in the final days of the regular season. But this season has been far from ideal for the Heat, which has used 24 different starting lineups on its way to a likely appearance in the play-in tournament after entering last season’s playoffs as the Eastern Conference’s top seed.

The Heat’s new starting lineup meant a new-look bench rotation that didn’t include Cody Zeller.

With Love playing as a reserve, he was used as the backup center in the non-Adebayo minutes. That meant Zeller was pushed out of the rotation.

Zeller, who has been used as the Heat’s backup center since he joined the team during the All-Star break, received his first DNP-CD (did not play, coach’s decision) of the season on Tuesday.

While playing the 17 minutes that Adebayo was on the bench, Love finished with seven points on 3-of-7 shooting from the field and 1-of-4 shooting on threes, four rebounds, two assists and one block while posting a positive plus/minus of plus-seven as the backup center in the Heat’s win over the Pistons.

Tuesday was just continuation of Love’s success at center. He entered the game with a negative plus/minus of minus-four since joining Miami, but he’s now a plus-24 in the 65 minutes that he has played as a center with the Heat.

With Zeller not used, the Heat went with a short eight-man rotation against the Pistons. The only reserves Miami used in Detroit were Kyle Lowry, Caleb Martin and Love.

It’s worth noting that the Heat entered Tuesday’s game as healthy as it has been all season. Rookie forward Nikola Jovic (back spasms) was Miami’s only player unavailable for the contest.

With 16 of the Heat’s 17 players available against the Pistons, two-way contract center Orlando Robinson was made inactive for the game, despite being healthy, to fulfill NBA roster requirements. Jovic was the second Heat player on the inactive list Tuesday.

It was a strange night for the Heat’s leading duo of Adebayo and Butler.

Adebayo, who entered averaging a team-high 9.3 rebounds per game, did not grab his first rebound of Tuesday’s game until there was 11:42 left in the third quarter.

Butler, who entered averaging a team-high 22.8 points on 13.9 field-goal attempts per game, did not put up his first field-goal attempt of Tuesday’s game until there was 1:41 left in the second quarter.

Adebayo closed with 18 points on 6-of-10 shooting from the field and 6-of-6 shooting from the foul line, four rebounds, two assists and two steals in 31 minutes

Butler eventually turned up his aggressiveness in the fourth quarter to lead the Heat to the win. He attempted 11 field goals and eight free throws in the second half after taking just one field goal and three free throws in the first half.

“I like to pass the ball and move the ball, get my guys involved,” Butler said. “And then if I need to score, I feel like I can score whenever I need to.”

While still not likely, the door opened slightly on Tuesday for the Heat in its push to avoid the play-in tournament.

Along with the Heat’s win in Detroit, the Brooklyn Nets lost to the Minnesota Timberwolves on Tuesday.

That has the No. 7 Heat (42-37) just one game behind the No. 6 Nets (43-36) in the loss column in the East standings. But that gap is really two games because Brooklyn holds the head-to-head tiebreaker over Miami.

With both teams only having three games left to play in the regular season, the Heat essentially needs to win out to have a chance at passing the Nets. But even if Miami wins each of its three remaining games, Brooklyn still needs to go 1-2 for the Heat to move into sixth place and avoid the play-in tournament.

The Nets’ final three games are: at Pistons, vs. Orlando Magic and vs. Philadelphia 76ers.

To escape having to qualify for the playoffs through the play-in tournament, the Heat needs to finish as a top-six playoff seed in the East. The seventh through 10th-place teams in each conference participate in the play-in tournament.

With the Atlanta Hawks and Toronto Raptors both winning on Tuesday, the Heat remains two games ahead of the No. 8 Hawks (40-39) and No. 9 Raptors (40-39) in the loss column.

While there remains the possibility of Miami falling to eighth or ninth place in the East, it would take a Heat collapse in the final week of the regular season for that to happen.

“The goal is to win out,” Adebayo said. “The biggest thing for us is just to try to win out and see where the chips fall.”

Closing the regular season as the No. 7 seed and hosting a play-in game against the No. 8 team for the right to the East’s seventh playoff seed on April 11 is, by far, the most likely outcome for the Heat.