What Kevin Love’s injury return means for the Heat as playoffs near

Love has missed the last 14 games with a right heel bruise where funny enough, the contest he played in last was against the Blazers on Feb. 27. Spoelstra said that with Love, it will be “easy” to incorporate him back into the Heat’s rotation because he embraces the role he has and said because of that “he can still be who he was in short bursts.”

“With Kevin, it’s kind of easy. It’s not like rocket science, you’re talking about a highly decorated, multi year all star who has embraced and accepted a role coming off the bench,” Spoelstra said. “If you could get players of his caliber to do that all the time in their mid 30s and bring that Veteran experience, but also the talent like on any given night, he can still be who he was in short bursts. If you can get guys to embrace that, there’d be a whole lot more guys like that that would have an impact around the league. He makes our best players better because of experience and spacing. As we know he’s a fantastic rebounder, but that experience is something that has really helped our group. It’ll be good to have him back.”

How Love has impacted the Heat off the court 

There’s no doubt that for any Miami fan, it could be exciting for the Love of the past to be unleashed , but he has shown that before as the primary backup to center Bam Adebayo. Besides being impactful on the floor, his veteran leadership has paid dividends for the team as Spoelstra said to ClutchPoints that during his playing absence, it’s “important for our team to develop other connectors.”

“He is a connector. I think this also has been important for our team to develop other connectors and we’d like to say that we need leadership at all levels, and it may look different for other guys, there might be smaller pockets of opportunities to lead depending on who the player is, but everybody can be a leader in the locker room and quite frankly, we need it right now,” Spoelstra said. “While Kevin was out, Thomas [Bryant] really stepped up and provided really quality, winning minutes, and that’s been really encouraging to see. Niko [Nikola Jovic] also has developed into more opportunities, not only starting in the front-court with Bam, but playing some of these games as our reserved five for pockets of the game and that’s been good for us as well. But it’ll be good to have Kevin available along with those guys.”

Spoelstra focusing on building consistency with few weeks left

With Love coming back along with Jimmy Butler and others like Tyler Herro and Duncan Robinson who are still out, as the season comes to a close, cohesion could be a concern. However, Spoelstra said before Friday’s game that he’s not even thinking about that and is more focused on building “consistency to win games.”

We’re thinking about whatever we need to do to build consistency to win games. We’re not thinking about the narrative of ‘Well we’ll just wait till the playoffs,’ we have a lot of work to do,” Spoelstra said. “There’s only 10 games, but these games are really important. And each game will be an opportunity for us to get better. Yes, there’ll be some elements of trying to build continuity, but more importantly than any of the continuities, consistency and sustainability to our identity. This far into the season, we know what our identity is, that has nothing to do with who’s available and who’s not available. It’s about getting to that identity more consistently. When we do that, we put ourselves in a much better position to win basketball games.”

As Speolstra said, there are 10 games left and there is no room for error as the Heat are 39-33 which puts them seventh in the Eastern Conference. These next two games are must-wins as they have the Blazers Friday and then the Washington Wizards Sunday.