Another day, another late-game collapse for the Miami Heat.
After pulling ahead by as many as 17 points in the first half and beginning the fourth quarter with an 11-point lead, the Heat again wilted down to stretch to drop its third straight game and hit a new rock bottom for this season in Saturday night’s ugly 114-109 loss to the middling and injury-depleted Chicago Bulls at Kaseya Center. The loss dropped the Heat to 29-34 this season, falling five games under the .500 mark for the first time since the 2020-21 season.
“It’s definitely a tough loss,” Heat guard Tyler Herro said, with the third game of Miami’s five-game homestand set for Monday against the Charlotte Hornets (7:30 p.m., FanDuel Sports Network Sun). “We had a lead, lost it again. We put ourselves in position to have another chance to win the game at the end. But we fell short, didn’t guard anybody on that end of the ball. And the offense was off a little bit in the fourth.”
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Miami Heat
Takeaways: It happened again. Another fourth-quarter collapse dooms Heat in ugly home loss to Bulls
March 08, 2025 10:36 PM
The Heat has now wasted a fourth-quarter lead in seven of its last eight losses and in a total of 14 losses this season. Only the Minnesota Timberwolves entered Sunday with more blown fourth-quarter leads (16 blown fourth-quarter leads) than the Heat this season.
The Heat has also blown a double-digit lead in 16 losses this season, which is the second-most such collapses in the NBA this season behind only the Utah Jazz (17 blown double-digit leads).
Most of the Heat’s late-game meltdowns have come since the Jimmy Butler breakup turned ugly in early January. With Butler playing just five games for the Heat since the start of January amid serving three team-issued suspensions before eventually being traded to the Golden State Warriors on Feb. 6, Miami has missed the player who was its top closer.
Not only is the Heat just 12-20 since Jan. 2, but it has also been outscored by an NBA-worst 14.5 points per 100 possessions in the fourth quarter during this span. Twelve of the Heat’s 16 blown double-digit leads and 11 of its 14 blown fourth-quarter leads have come during this stretch.
The Heat is also just 13-20 in clutch games (one that has a margin of five points or fewer inside the final five minutes of the fourth quarter) this season after recording a 77-57 record in clutch games over the previous three seasons.
“If we knew, we would do it,” Herro said when asked how the Heat can overcome this late-game hurdle. “I’m not really sure how to get over that hurdle right now. But just continuing to stick with it.”
Heat coach Erik Spoelstra took part of the blame for Saturday’s fourth-quarter issues, expressing regret for some of his rotation decisions in the loss.
With the Heat playing its third game in four days, on the second night of a back-to-back set and its ninth game in 14 days, Spoelstra believes he used the Heat’s best players for too many minutes on Saturday. Bam Adebayo played 38 minutes against the Bulls just one night after logging 43 minutes in Friday’s loss to the Timberwolves, and Herro played 37 minutes against the Bulls after logging 39 minutes in Friday’s defeat to the Timberwolves while battling a lingering head cold.
Adebayo and Herro are both averaging a team-high 36 minutes per game since the All-Star break.
“I felt like I didn’t do a good job with managing the minutes,” Spoelstra said. “... Nobody in the locker room is going to make an excuse — our main guys are not going to make an excuse about it — but I felt like there was some fatigue in that fourth quarter. If I could have gotten them a little bit more of a break at some point during the game, I think we would have gotten enough of a boost to finish this off. But that’s on me and I have to do a better job for this team.”
But Spoelstra also called Saturday’s defeat “a regression” after the Heat battled played quality teams like the Timberwolves, Cleveland Cavaliers, New York Knicks and Milwaukee Bucks in recent losses. Saturday’s loss was different, as it came against a struggling Bulls team missing key players like Ayo Dosunmu, Lonzo Ball, Nikola Vucevic and Patrick Williams because of injuries.
“We’ve been battling for several games and I really liked a lot of the things that were going on even in some of these losses. Today was a regression for one night,” Spoelstra said. “We have the competitive character, we’re going to bounce back. But we had some of these things bubble up again. We know what they are. Some of the missed shots, poor decisions offensively that lead to lack of focus defensively.”
Heat players agreed.
“Besides tonight, I feel like the games we’ve lost were all games we obviously could have won,” Herro said after Saturday’s loss to the Bulls. “But they felt like we’re heading in the right direction as coach has said. Tonight just wasn’t one of those losses. It was a bad loss.”
A bad loss that dropped the Heat from seventh to ninth place in the Eastern Conference and further into play-in tournament territory (seventh-through-10th-place teams competing for the final two playoff seeds in each conference).
While the Heat is still 3.5 games ahead of the 10th-place Bulls, it now sits percentage points behind the eighth-place Orlando Magic and one-half game behind the seventh-place Atlanta Hawks. Any hope the Heat had of earning a top-six seed in the East and avoiding the play-in is pretty much gone, entering Sunday 5.5 games behind the sixth-place Detroit Pistons.
According to Basketball Reference’s playoff probabilities report, the Heat entered Sunday with just a 4.3 percent chance of finishing with a top-six seed in the East to make the playoffs without needing to take part in the play-in tournament. Basketball Reference’s modeling has the Heat’s most likely finish listed at 35.3 percent for eighth place in the East.
“We’re all sick of losing,” Adebayo said. “I mean, that’s the easiest thing that can happen in this league. It’s hard to win games in this league, as we all know. It’s up to us as players to dig ourselves out of this hole.”
The Heat has just 19 regular-season games left, but Spoelstra remains hopeful through all the crushing losses.
“We’re all in this together. That’s what I told the group right now,” Spoelstra said late Saturday night following the Heat’s latest fourth-quarter collapse. “I’m fully with them. This is an opportunity for all of us to face our demons to get past this. This is not something that’s comfortable for any one of us and I see something amazing on the other side if we can collectively overcome this.”
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Anthony Chiang covers the Miami Heat for the Miami Herald. He attended the University of Florida and was born and raised in Miami.