Despite the Miami Heat facing the New York Knicks without Jalen Brunson, the team would still suffer from a 140-138 loss on Friday night to take them to 1-1 in NBA Cup group play. On top of the Heat's bad loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers last Wednesday, there has been a consistent issue with the team throughout the early portion of the season, and it has come to a point where it's lost them games.
Looking at Miami's rebounding, they were once again outmatched on the glass, 51-46, especially offensively, 20-15, with New York having eight offensive boards in the fourth quarter alone, and in total, Mitchell Robinson had eight. This would track, as looking at the statistics as of Saturday, the team has the league's third-worst defensive rebounding percentage, which is the percentage of available defensive rebounds a team grabs, at 66.1 percent, via The Miami Herald.
This led to head coach Erik Spoelstra saying that now, rebounding has been “costing us games.”
“That’s where we are, and we’ve said it enough that we have to fix it. We’re being stubborn about it, the things that we need to do better. I feel like we’re fully capable of doing it. Is it easy? Winning is not easy in this league,” Spoelstra said.
“We pride ourselves on our rebounding. It just has to improve,” Spoelstra continued. “The league is also changing. We have to adjust to that. More teams are crashing four guys and crashing their perimeter players. A lot of times, cutting off-ball, now that cutter becomes the most dangerous offensive rebounder. We just need to make that adjustment and have more awareness with it. We’re fully capable of that.”
Jaime Jaquez Jr. on the Heat's woes, plus the impact of Bam Adebayo
As consistency is key for the Heat in getting better on the glass, it doesn't help that the team is also dealing with injuries, mainly in this case to big man Bam Adebayo, who's been out with a toe injury. How much does Adebayo impact Miami's ability on the glass?
Well, when he was active in the first eight games, the Heat ranked 14th in the aforementioned defensive rebounding percentage at 69.8 percent. Even more so, when Adebayo was on the court, Miami had a defensive rebounding percentage of 74 percent, good for second in the NBA due to his ability to record boards, but also his box-out ability, which greatly impacts the other team, though it goes unnoticed.
As the Heat await Adebayo's return, the team will work on a “collective buy-in” to get better on rebounds, as Jaime Jaquez Jr. puts it.
“It’s just a collective buy-in,” Jaquez said. “I think as a group, we understand that we don’t want to keep losing in the fashion that we have. We want to be a great team, we just got to go back to the drawing board, go back to watching film, understand what we need to do to clean this stuff up, we know what the problem is. It’s just accomplishing it is really the difficult part.”
Miami is now 7-6 as the team looks to bounce back in a rematch against the Knicks on Monday.
