Dave Hyde: Heat lose Adebayo, wild play-in game and now face offseason of needed change
There’s nothing quite like this feeling in sports. You can end your season by getting blown out and everything’s clear. You can end your season on the final play and just shrug.
There’s nothing, though, like having your best player go down to injury early in the final game , competing like crazy and then ending your season in the wildest of finishes and wondering what might have been. That’s what happened to the Miami Heat in Tuesday night’s play-in loss to the Charlotte Hornets in overtime, 127-126 . Sure, it was a play-in game, and so you can dismiss it outright as a night to nowhere.
Maybe so. It’s not like the Heat were going to challenge for anything important this season. All Tuesday’s game would’ve earned them was another play-in game Friday.
But if you watched the game, if you followed the change of leads, if you appreciate great competition in any arena, this felt like Game 7 of a playoff series. That’s the wonder of sports. Everyone entered dismissing the Heat and the Hornets and, no doubt, will do so again today.
It won’t factor at all in this offseason’s decisions to upgrade this Heat team. But in the moment of this flawed, unsteady Heat team played its hard out . And a young Charlotte team answering right back.