Miami Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra doesn’t believe that the team needs to add another piece to the roster in the 2022-23 season.
According to Stan Van Gundy on TNT’s broadcast of Tuesday’s game between the Heat and Oklahoma City Thunder, Spoelstra believes the team just needs to get healthy.
“We talked to Spo before the game about whether or not the Heat needed to add somebody, add another piece,” Van Gundy said. “And he really doesn’t think so — they just need to get whole.”
Injuries have ravaged the Heat in the 2022-23 season, with Jimmy Butler, Tyler Herro, Bam Adebayo, Caleb Martin, Kyle Lowry, Gabe Vincent, Victor Oladipo and others missing time.
That didn’t change on Tuesday night, as Herro, Adebayo and Lowry were all out of the lineup, yet Miami was able to pull off a 112-111 victory over Oklahoma City.
Jimmy Butler led the way for the Heat, scoring 35 points, as the team set an NBA record for most made free throws without a miss in a single game, going 40-for-40 from the line.
The Miami Heat set an NBA record tonight going 40/40 from the FT line.
— Heat Nation (@HeatNationCom) January 11, 2023
Max Strus (22 points, seven rebounds) and Victor Oladipo (19 points, four rebounds, four assists) also came up big for Miami on Tuesday.
Spoelstra may have a point about the team getting healthy, as the Heat really haven’t had their full rotation available for most of the 2022-23 season.
Oladipo started the season out of the lineup, and Herro, Butler and others have gone in and out of the rotation with injuries for the majority of the season. Not only is it hard for the team to get wins with so many key players out, but it’s also made it tough for the Heat to build the chemistry that made them so lethal last season.
Heat veteran Udonis Haslem spoke earlier this season about how the team forgot how hard it worked to establish the chemistry it had in the 2021-22 season when it finished with the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference.
“Sometimes you just expect to pick up where you left off,” Haslem said. “We expect the camaraderie and everything to pick up where it left off and we maybe forgot how hard we had to work to get that chemistry.”
The Heat did lose veteran forward P.J. Tucker in free agency, but for the most part the core of the team has remained the same.
Tuesday’s win pushed the Heat to 22-20 on the season, and they hold the No. 8 spot in the Eastern Conference.
There is still plenty of time for Miami to turn things around, and Spoelstra appears to be confident in the group that the Heat currently have.
