Miami is on the brink of elimination, and Butler knows the team’s play must be better on Friday.
Following the Heat’s 116–105 loss in the play-in tournament to the Hawks on Tuesday night, Miami star Jimmy Butler challenged his team to be better on Friday as it looks to stave off elimination.
“We have to stay confident,” Butler said in the postgame media availability, per ESPN’s Nick Friedell. “We have to know we are capable of winning, if we start out the right way and rebound obviously. But it’s just, I don’t know, shots don’t go in, we foul—that’s never the recipe for success with us. So come Friday, we’ve got to play, like, legit the exact opposite that we played tonight.”
With the win, the Hawks captured the No. 7 seed in the East and will face the Celtics in the first round of the playoffs. The Heat now await the winner of Wednesday night’s game between the Raptors and Bulls for a “winner-take-all” tilt for the No. 8 seed on Friday.
As for what went wrong on Tuesday night? It was simple for Butler.
“Rebounding was just horrendous,” Butler said after the Heat were outrebounded 63-39 by the Hawks. “We didn’t put body on body and they got all the rebounds, all the second-chance points. And that was the game.”
After taking a 2–0 lead in the first quarter, the Heat never led again, trailing by as many as 24 points in the first half.
Coach Erik Spoelstra echoed Butler’s sentiment on his team’s poor rebounding effort.
“There’s probably been a little bit more than half-dozen times, maybe 8-to-10 times where we have not rebounded where it has just been absolutely crippling, in terms of how it’s hurt us,” he said. “We definitely have to get to the film and go back to all the fundamentals. We knew coming into this game, this game would be decided by ball in the air, ball on the floor, and it certainly was.”
