Kyle Lowry did not attempt to sugarcoat, not that it would have been possible in the wake of social media seemingly chronicling every twist and turn of the truly bizarre scene on the Miami Heat bench in the third quarter of Wednesday night’s 118-104 loss to the Golden State Warriors at FTX Arena.
“It was crazy,” the veteran point guard said.
Even that might have been an understatement.
In the midst of a 19-0 tidal wave by the Warriors to open the second half, forward Jimmy Butler and captain Udonis Haslem got into an augment so heated that two of the team’s strongest players had to physical restrain each, with Bam Adebayo holding back Haslem and Dewayne Dedmon moving aside Butler.
And all of that came after coach Erik Spoelstra seemingly asked Butler if he wanted to fight during an expletive-laced moment in the huddle, Spoelstra himself held aside at one point by forward Markieff Morris.
No, it was not the Heat’s best look, as ugly as the losses this week first to a Philadelphia 76ers team lacking Joel Embiid and James Harden on Monday night, and then this loss to a Warriors team lacking Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green, among others.
“We’re in the situation where we have a lot of competitive guys,” Lowry said, “one being our biggest competitor is our head coach, and Jimmy and U.D., tough, competitive guys.”
In the wake of the incident, the Heat rallied from that 19-point deficit after 50-50 halftime tie, briefly moved into the lead, and then wilted at the finish, now with four losses in their last seven games.
“We have a very competitive, gnarly group and we were getting our asses kicked,” Spoelstra said, with the postgame media session starting more than 30 minutes later than typical. “Two straight games, we were not playing to the level that we wanted to play. And I would say virtually every single person in that huddle was pretty animated in our disappointment in how we were playing.
“I know how it can probably look to the outside, but as I mentioned before, that is more our language than playing without passion or without toughness or without multiple efforts and a lifelessness.”
Adebayo said it was a rare peek into the feistiness of the roster.
“We’ve got passionate players on this team, and coaches included,” he said. “So we’re going to have those moments when things aren’t going right and we get frustrated and explode, ‘cause we’re so passionate and want to win that bad.
“At the end of the day, we’re brothers. We going to get through this. This is us in practice. It just so happened it boiled like that in a game. In our practice, we get like that, to that point, where it looks like we want to fight each other when we get that mad. But it’s just a competitive nature that we have on this team.”
The commotion apparently began when Butler took umbrage to being told the Heat were playing as if they were scared. It was the fuse that ignited what followed.
“It happens,” Lowry said. “It’s just, listen, we got guys that really want to win basketball games and guys that work extremely hard. And passion comes out, the fire and the emotion comes out at times. But like I said, to us this is nothing.”
Requests for postgame comment from Butler and Haslem were denied by the team, amid the NBA’s ongoing policy of no postgame locker room access that was established as part of pandemic protocols.
“Frustration builds sometimes,” Lowry said. “But I think it’s a situation where it’s good to get it out of the way and then move forward. We’re not going to dwell on it. We’re going to continue to look and see what happened and go from there.”
Just as Spoelstra initially tried to blow off the incident by quipping that it was a disagreement over postgame dinner plans, veteran power forward P.J. Tucker insisted it was much ado about nothing beyond another ugly loss for a team still atop the NBA’s Eastern Conference, with nine games remaining in the regular season.
“We’re grown men, man,” Tucker said. “This is part of the game. I haven’t been on any team that emotions didn’t run over sometimes. Get back together, everybody love each other, blah, blah, blah.
“I think it’s going to work itself out. We don’t have any guys where it’s just like hard to deal with, you got a lot of other b.s. that goes on. I think everybody’s just trying to figure it out all at the same time, just like other teams are trying to figure out. It’s a part of it, man, the ups and downs, the valleys and peaks of an NBA season.”
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