Head coach Erik Spoelstra of the Miami Heat talks to his players in the second half against the New Orleans Pelicans at Smoothie King Center on February 11, 2026 in New Orleans, Louisiana. Michael DeMocker Getty Images
The Miami Heat needs a break.
That’s exactly what the injury-riddled Heat will now get after playing nine games in a 15-day span, with Wednesday night’s 123-111 win over the New Orleans Pelicans at Smoothie King Center marking the end of Miami’s pre-All-Star break schedule. The Heat enters the week-long break in eighth place in the Eastern Conference with a 29-27 record.
“Everybody is looking forward to it because our guys have been really pushing through,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said of the upcoming break in the schedule. “While we’ve had guys out, and we’re not making any excuses about it, but we’ve been pushing for, it feels like weeks.”
But the Heat knows it will need to keep pushing for more wins when it returns from the break next week. Miami wants to avoid a fourth straight appearance in the NBA’s play-in tournament, which features the seventh-through-10th-place teams competing for the final two playoff seeds in each conference.
The Heat, which is just 15-20 after a strong 14-7 start to the season, enters the break one-half game behind the seventh-place Orlando Magic and two games behind the sixth-place Philadelphia 76ers in the East standings with 26 regular-season games left to play. Miami needs to finish among the East’s top six teams to qualify for the playoffs without needing to take part in the play-in tourney.
“We’ve had some really tough losses where we’ve played really well,” Spoelstra said. “That’s the untold story about this. You are ultimately what your record is, but we feel differently about that. We’re playing really good ball. We just need to be a little bit more consistent with it.”
Spoelstra then, for the second time in the last week, pointed to the fact that the Heat enters the break with the NBA’s fourth-best defensive rating and fifth-highest scoring offense as a source of hope that better days are ahead. But despite Miami’s high scoring amid its fast-paced play that creates more possessions, it ranks just 17th in offensive rating for the season when factoring in efficiency.
“You just look at our defense, our defense is improving,” Spoelstra said. “It’s getting better, we’re third or fourth, depending on the metric you look at. It’s the same thing with our offense. The efficiency isn’t exactly where we need it to be, but we can explode on teams. We’re fourth in scoring. It’s a matter of doing it in those moments of truth when it really matters to push a win.
“Offensively, I think when we get our guys back, I think we’re going to be a really dangerous offensive team. We can be fourth in the league in scoring with large parts of our rosters on the sideline. Just wait until we get our guys back into the fold.”
Miami Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra talks to the team during the first half of a game against the Utah Jazz on Monday, Feb. 9, 2026, at the Kaseya Center in Miami. Alie Skowronski askowronski@miamiherald.com
The expectation that a few rotation players will soon return from injury is a big reason why the Heat remains optimistic that its best basketball of the season is still ahead.
The Heat defeated the Pelicans on Wednesday despite being without four rotation players, missing Tyler Herro (ribs), Pelle Larsson (right forearm strain), Norman Powell (low back tightness) and Andrew Wiggins (left toe inflammation).
While Larsson, Powell and Wiggins just recently went out and are dealing with what are expected to be short-term issues, Herro missed his 15th straight game because of a rib injury on Wednesday. It marked the 45th game that Herro has been unavailable for through the first 56 games of the Heat’s season.
Herro missed the first 17 games of the season due to offseason ankle surgery, 13 games because of a toe contusion and now 15 straight games because of a rib injury. The team is listing Herro’s current injury as “right costochondral; injury to the ribs.”
Herro, who is eligible for an extension this upcoming offseason, has averaged 21.9 points, 4.7 rebounds, 2.7 assists and one steal per game while shooting 49.7 percent from the field and 35.8% from three-point range in his 11 appearances (10 starts) this season.
The Heat’s leading trio of Bam Adebayo, Powell and Herro have played just eight games together this season in large part because of Herro’s injury issues.
When asked Wednesday whether Herro will return at some point following the upcoming All-Star break, Spoelstra offered some clarity but not a timetable.
“He will be back,” Spoelstra said. “Yes, for sure. I don’t have a timeline exactly of when that will be. ... We’ll see how he progresses.”
The Heat’s injury issues have forced it to use a different starting lineup in eight straight games leading into the break. But hope is the Heat will be as healthy as it has been in a long time when it returns from the break.
“Hopefully we can get everybody back. I feel like we should,” Heat second-year center Kel’el Ware said. “I feel like we should have everybody back. Everybody should be healthy. Everybody take some time off and we can come back stronger.”
One thing working in the Heat’s favor is it has a relatively soft schedule ahead. The Heat enters the break with the NBA’s seventh-easiest remaining schedule, according to Tankathon.com, based solely on the current combined winning percentage of teams left to play.
“Just a hungry team. Very hungry,” Heat sixth man Jaime Jaquez Jr. said of what can be expected from the team after the break. “We got a lot to prove. We got a lot to still do in this season. The beautiful thing about it, we got a lot of games left still. But this is going to be a big push for us. We’re going to be a hungry team. Go out there and firing on all cylinders.”
For now, Powell (NBA Three-Point Contest and NBA All-Star Game), Ware (Rising Stars event), Keshad Johnson (NBA Slam Dunk Contest) and Jahmir Young (G League Three-Point Contest and G League Next Up Game) are off to Los Angeles to represent the Heat at All-Star Weekend.
But when the Heat returns from the break to reconvene next week for practice on Thursday in Miami before resuming its schedule on Friday against the Hawks in Atlanta, the focus will be on stringing together wins. Miami has only won consecutive games once since the start of 2026.
“There’s been a lot of good things happening,” Spoelstra said. “It hasn’t necessarily translated to wins. We know that. When we get back after this break, that’s what we plan on changing.”