On this week’s Heat Check: What should the Miami Heat do ahead of the NBA’s Feb. 5 trade deadline? And the “Mayor of NBA Threads” tells his story. By Pierre Taylor
Through the first three months of the schedule, the most consistent aspects of the Miami Heat’s season has been its inconsistent play and player availability.
Unfortunately for the Heat, both of those problems made an appearance in Thursday night’s 127-110 loss to the Portland Trail Blazers at Moda Center that dropped Miami to 1-2 on its five-game West Coast trip.
While playing without a chunk of its rotation because of injuries, the Heat (23-22) fell to 9-15 in its past 24 games after a strong 14-7 start to the season. The middling Heat has yet to win consecutive games in January.
“You can’t be excited about one win,” Heat guard Norman Powell said. “You’ve got another game coming up, and we’ve just got to stick to what our game plan is. We can’t have too many lulls, five-, six-minute lulls of not knowing what we’re doing defensively, not knowing what we’re trying to get out of the offense as well. We’ve got to collectively be on the same page and sustain it. We’ve done it before. We’ve gone on win streaks, and we’ve got to get back to putting our imprint on games multiple times in a row.”
It would help to have consistency in the rotation for multiple games, as well. But injury issues have led to the Heat using four different starting lineups in the past six games, and Miami’s leading trio of Bam Adebayo, Tyler Herro and Powell has been limited to just 132 minutes together this season.
Two Heat starters are currently dealing with injuries, as Herro is not with the team on the trip and missed his fourth straight game Thursday with a right costochondral injury to his ribs and guard Davion Mitchell is again sidelined by a lingering left shoulder injury he initially suffered while trying to run through a screen during the Heat’s Jan. 13 win against the Phoenix Suns.
After hurting his shoulder on Jan. 13, Mitchell missed the next two games before returning to play in two games and then re-aggravating the injury during Tuesday’s win over the Sacramento Kings. Thursday marked the third total game Mitchell has missed because of the shoulder contusion.
“No,” Mitchell said when asked if he needs to rethink running through so many screens when he returns from his shoulder issue. “That’s just who I am, honestly. That’s how I got in this league. That’s the reason the Miami Heat fell in love with me, and the way I’ve played on that end of the floor. And I love doing it. It’s not like I feel like I got to do it. I just love doing it. It makes the game fun for me, so I’m just going to keep doing it.”
Heat coach Erik Spoelstra added that Mitchell is “a pitbull, so he’s going to try to fight through all the screens, and that’s what makes him who he is.”
“He loves to defend,” Spoelstra said, with the Heat continuing its West Coast trip on Saturday against the Utah Jazz at Delta Center (9:30 p.m., FanDuel Sports Network Sun). “He loves to take the challenge. In this modern-day NBA, you’re going to deal with 50, 60 pick-and-rolls on a nightly basis. If you’re guarding one of the main options, then you’re going to probably have 25 of those. It takes courage, it takes toughness to be able to fight through screens. He’s been able to do that. He’s built like a tank. That was kind of just a different, unfortunate collision.”
Bam Adebayo #13 of the Miami Heat dribbles against Deni Avdija #8 of the Portland Trail Blazers during the first half at Moda Center on January 22, 2026 in Portland. Soobum Im Getty Images
Second-year center Kel’el Ware, who has started 27 games this season but has played as the Heat’s backup center in his past six appearances, returned to Miami on Thursday for further treatment on his strained right hamstring and will miss the rest of the Heat’s West Coast trip that has two games remaining on Saturday against the Jazz and Sunday against the Phoenix Suns at Mortgage Matchup Center (8 p.m., FanDuel Sports Network Sun).
“To do more work around the clock at the arena, instead of trying to cram it in on the plane,” Spoelstra said of the team’s decision to send Ware back to Miami. “But we’re optimistic about it.”
Ware played in Monday’s loss to the Golden State Warriors to begin the trip, but will miss the final four games of the trip because of his hamstring issues. Ware, 21, played in each of the Heat’s first 43 games of the season before this hamstring injury.
“I don’t think it’ll be a long-term thing, but I don’t have a specific timeline on it,” Spoelstra continued on Ware. “We’ll just wait until we get back to Miami. He and [Heat senior director of rehabilitation] Jeff Ruiz have already started the process. He had a good day today. They’ll work the next few days, and we expect there to be some progress.”
With Adebayo and Ware the only centers on the Heat’s current standard roster, Miami has used forward Nikola Jovic (6-foot-10 and 205 pounds) as its fill-in backup center while Ware is sidelined.
But Jovic struggled in that role in Thursday’s loss to the Trail Blazers, finishing with five points on 2-of-8 shooting from the field, 1-of-7 shooting on threes and 0-of-2 shooting from the foul line, five rebounds and three assists in 17 minutes. The Heat was outscored by seven points with Jovic on the court.
“When he plays at the five, it opens things up for us,” Spoelstra said of Jovic following Thursday’s defeat in Portland. “All of his shots were basically wide open. We want him to play with assertiveness, with confidence. He’s so important to what we do. And this is part of being a professional basketball player and a team, where we want to be better than where we are. We have to show some grit, and Niko has got to show some grit right now to be able to fight through it. You’re always going to go through ups and downs. And when it’s a little bit tough, that’s when actually you can have a great breakthrough.”
The Heat is searching for that breakthrough, but instead it continues to hover around the .500 mark and again finds itself in play-in tournament territory.
After needing to qualify for the playoffs through the NBA’s play-in tournament in each of the last three seasons, the Heat entered Friday in eighth place in the Eastern Conference and again faces the possibility of another play-in tournament appearance. The play-in tourney features the seventh-through-10th-place teams competing for the final two playoff seeds in each conference.
“Just got to be more consistent,” Adebayo said. “We can’t front-run. Every game has to be, we hold the line on defense from the start of the game. And then from the start of the game to the start of the third, and we figure it out from there. We’re having too many games where we’ll play great defense one night. Another night, we’ll kind of take off. So that’s got to be the difference. We’ve just got to be more consistent on that end, even if we’re missing or making shots.”