Late-season slide has Heat on collision course with play-in: ‘It’s just been a challenging year’

The Miami Heat finished last season one win from advancing to the NBA Finals. This season, the Heat could find itself one loss away from missing the playoffs.

A late-season three-game losing skid has dropped the Heat further into play-in tournament territory with just five games left on its regular-season schedule.

“Losing is what got us here,” coach Erik Spoelstra said following the Heat’s latest setback, a 101-92 loss to the New York Knicks on Wednesday night at Madison Square Garden. “None of us feel good about it. This is where we are. You are what your record is, you are what has happened recently.”

The Heat’s 40-37 record has it in seventh place in the Eastern Conference standings, 1.5 games behind the No. 6 Nets (41-35) and four games behind the No. 5 Knicks (44-33) in the Eastern Conference standings. 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.

There’s still a path for the Heat to catch the Nets, but it won’t be easy. Miami is now two games behind Brooklyn in the loss column, but it’s essentially a three-game gap because the Nets own the head-to-head tiebreaker over the Heat after sweeping the regular-season series 3-0.

So hypothetically even if Miami wins four of its five remaining regular-season games, the Nets would need to go 2-4 through their final six games for the Heat to pass them in the standings.

There’s also technically still a path for the Heat to catch the Knicks, but it would require Miami to win each of its final five regular-season games and New York to lose its five remaining games. The Heat is four games behind the Knicks in the loss column, but it’s essentially five games because Wednesday’s Knicks win clinched the season series and head-to-head tiebreaker over the Heat.

In the unlikely scenario that there’s a three-way tie among the Heat, Nets and Knicks, Miami is on track to win that tiebreaker as the only likely division winner in the group.

And now the Heat must also look at the teams immediately behind it, as the No. 8 Atlanta Hawks and No. 9 Toronto Raptors are both just 1.5 games behind Miami.

“I think that’s still the goal,” Heat guard Gabe Vincent said of avoiding the play-in tournament. “I don’t think anything changes. Obviously, it gets more difficult the more games like this that we lose. But crazier things have happened.”

The problem is the Heat has been a bad team since the All-Star break, as it returns home to practice Friday before hosting the Dallas Mavericks on Saturday night.

Not only does the Heat hold an 8-10 record since the break, but it also owns the 22nd-ranked offensive rating, 26th-ranked defensive rating and 25th-ranked net rating in the 30-team NBA. The Heat, and the lottery-bound San Antonio Spurs and Portland Trail Blazers are the only teams in the league with a bottom-10 offense and bottom-10 defense since the break.

“Our guys are embracing the struggle,” Spoelstra said. “There hasn’t been anything easy about this season. Sometimes seasons go like that. But the resolve is there and it may not feel like it right now to everybody on the outside, but our group feels that we can beat anybody anyplace anywhere anytime. We just have to do it.”

What has made this season so challenging for the Heat despite bringing back most of last season’s roster that entered last year’s playoffs as the East’s No. 1 seed?

“A number of things,” Vincent said. “From injuries to guys out, guys in, different lineups. It’s just been a challenging year. I don’t think it’s been a year any of us have expected, any of y’all had expected maybe. But it’s what we have nonetheless and we got to make the best of it moving forward.”

What’s concerning, though, is the Heat is arguably playing its worst basketball of the season in the final weeks of the season as the the start of the playoffs near. Miami entered the All-Star break with the NBA’s fifth-best defensive rating before becoming one of the worst defensive teams in the league after the break.

“Honestly, there’s just so many hiccups and we mess up a lot,” Heat wing Jimmy Butler said. “We kind of be making up stuff on the fly. We don’t know our coverages. I’m telling you, it’s not on any one guy because everybody should be communicating down the line. It’s easily correctable. But it just sucks that it’s at the time that it’s at now when we got five games left. These last five, I hope we can fix it.”

Spoelstra, Butler and the rest of the Heat’s locker room are trying to stay positive through the losses. But their resolve is being tested.

“We will regroup knowing that the momentum shifts like crazy either way,” Spoelstra said. “Right now, we’re in a downturn of that. It does not feel good for anybody in our locker room right now and we just have to regroup. The only solutions we have right now are in that locker room. We have the competitive character and we’ll gear up. We have three days to get ready for Dallas on Saturday.”

Butler added: “It ain’t over with until it’s over with. That’s the way I look at it. That’s the way we look at it. As long as we are in this thing together and we take everything a day at a time, it’s going to play out the way that it’s meant to play out.”

Right now, it appears it will play out with the Heat needing to make the playoffs through the play-in.

Through statistical analysis, FiveThirtyEight projects the Heat to finish the regular season as a play-in tournament team as the seventh seed in the East with a 43-39 record.

Basketball Reference’s playoff probabilities report also projects the Heat to close the regular season as a play-in team as the East’s seventh seed, giving Miami just a 16.8 percent chance of finishing as a top-six seed from where it currently stands.

“I know it’s going to turn around,” Butler said. “I know that all these guys will start making shots. It’s only a matter of time.”

Time is running out for the Heat.