The Heat have fallen back to being average

As the halfway point of the NBA season continues to get closer, we are starting to figure out what teams true identities are. Unfortunately for the Miami Heat their identity is seemingly more like an average team than the excellent team they started the season as. After their recent win vs Devin Booker and the Pheonix Suns, the Heat stand at a record of 21 – 19 through 40 games.

John Schuhmann of NBA.com has updated his NBA Power Rankings for week 13 and he has slotted the Heat right in the middle of the pack at 14th in the league. Now this was created before the Heat’s big win vs the suns, so maybe they can climb back up the rankings, but they are currently trending in the wrong direction. In the earlier rankings Miami was slotted at #11. Now their fall was due to the fact that they played 3 games and were not competitive. They lost the three games by a combined 64 points, for an average margin of 21.3 points. That is obviously atrocious.

Signal of long term problems?

As for why the Heat fell Schuhmann explains “With their losses in Minnesota and Oklahoma City, the Heat are 7-16 in games played between the 16 teams that are currently over .500. That’s the worst record within the group and it includes a 2-10 mark since Thanksgiving. The bigger difference between their 23 games against the good teams (115.2 points allowed per 100 possessions) and their 16 games against the bottom 14 (107.3 allowed per 100) has been on defense.”

So basically, the Heat have been terrible playing teams with a winning record, especially since Thanksgiving. The good news for Miami is that they typically take care of business when they play inferior teams. They beat the teams they are supposed to but rarely beat teams that are considered “good.” The obvious problem with this is that as the season goes on and we enter the postseason, there are no bad teams left. So, it is hard to have hope for the Heat making a run.

Miami will have plenty of opportunities to improve their spots before the next update as they play 3 games in the week that qualifies for the next rankings. One of those games is the one vs the Suns that the Heat used an excellent 1st half to build a lead and then rode a dominant 4th quarter from Adebayo to pull down the victory.

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