Heat’s late rally falls short but Davion Mitchell gives them a road map to win Game 3

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CLEVELAND — Walking into Rocket Arena on Wednesday, there were whispers of a legend of basketball lore slated to make an appearance that evening. He’s always roaming the sidelines with a Miami Heat logo stitched into his polo. Erik Spoelstra, as great a coach as he is, has an alter ego that carries its own aura: Game 2 Spo.

The Heat’s head honcho entered the arena 10-3 in Game 2 after his team loses a series opener. It’s one of the true testaments to his coaching wizardry, a stat people pull out when arguing his placement in the pantheon of the NBA’s greatest coaches ever. It represents his penchant for rewriting his lineup rotations on the fly, reconfiguring his schemes and leaning on players who do things history says they just aren’t supposed to do.

He didn’t get to add another win to that legacy, falling to the Cavaliers 121-112 to go down 0-2 heading back to Miami. But this game will certainly be etched into the Game 2 Spo legacy, revealing the potential road map to get his team back in this series.

It starts with the recent ascension of Davion Mitchell and what that opens up for All-Star Tyler Herro. Mitchell wore them down so that Herro could carve them up, a recipe that nearly worked.

“It’s kind of like a boxing match, honestly,” Mitchell said. “I think that at the beginning of the game, they got more energy, so they’re in the right gaps, they’re more aggressive. Then throughout the game, they get tired and they’re not in the right spots.”

Davion with back-to-back buckets in the paint 💪

We trail 99-88 with 8:20 left in the game. pic.twitter.com/Dt1SIUKCxM

— Miami HEAT (@MiamiHEAT) April 24, 2025

Mitchell’s playmaking vision can be limited, but his tenacity attacking the paint early in the fourth quarter carried the Heat through Herro’s stint on the bench. He scored 14 of his 18 points in the final period to launch a 25-8 fourth-quarter run, with his defensive pressure finally creating transition opportunities. Miami was down 19 late in the third quarter but cut the lead to 2 with 3:41 left.

Herro had 33 points on 14-for-24 shooting in 40 minutes, though his best action was using his gravity to open things up for the rest of the offense deep into crunchtime.

The Heat shot 26-for-36 (72.2 percent) inside the arc, compared to 17-for-37 (45.9 percent) for Cleveland. The Cavs hit six more 3s on the same number of attempts, establishing the edge during their record-setting second quarter when they hit 11 shots from downtown, the most in a playoff quarter in NBA history. In the end, that was the edge. It was Max Strus and Donovan Mitchell catching fire for a few minutes. Otherwise, the Heat played the Cavs fairly even, a sign this series may come back to Cleveland after all.

Before the fourth quarter, Cleveland had a triumvirate of ballhandlers who just carved their way through the defense, ensuring every half-court possession had movement and flow. It was hard to even tell whether Darius Garland or Donovan Mitchell was on the floor during the second period, as the offense hardly changed.

Comparatively, Miami’s half-court offense drove around like it was lost in a neighborhood of cul-de-sacs. Herro was the only player who could create his own shot when there was a defender in front of him. Davion Mitchell is good when attacking seams in the defense and Andrew Wiggins is more or less the same, but they struggled to create separation when they attacked cross-matches. Bam Adebayo had some success drawing doubles and kicking out to shooters, but Cleveland closes out well to the back side and Miami doesn’t have enough creators out there to work around the defense’s shift activity.

Then everything changed in the fourth quarter, starting with Davion Mitchell. His motor kicked into high gear, driving through everyone in front of him and hitting absurd shots in the paint. The Cavs were giving him a little more space as they lost a bit of spark in their shift activity, giving him enough room to get two feet in the paint with momentum.

“I can beat my man, I can get to my spots. They’re not helping as much,” he said. “They kind of play soft a little bit, which maybe I can be more aggressive against. You kind of just read the game, keep making the right plays and don’t try to force anything.”

Miami seemed to recognize early in the fourth quarter that drive-and-kick opportunities weren’t really coming and it had to just score and worry about shot quality later. Once Herro checked back into the game, his movement got Cleveland’s defense into rotation more, and that opened up looks for Mitchell and the rest of the team.

“It’s tough to just run a direct play for him against this defense, so this is something we’ve had to develop for a few months,” Spoelstra said. “Getting him off the ball, creating some overreactions, become a lot more patient, and it opens up a lot of things for us. It might be different next game.”

The goal is to create overreactions, having Herro run curls past the point of attack to create a sense of confusion. Spoelstra charted out a map for Herro to circumnavigate by running into antithetical gaps on a possession-by-possession basis, creating inconsistencies that got Cleveland’s fatigued defense out of rhythm. That gave Mitchell, Nikola Jović and Adebayo more room to operate and more opportunities to score in the paint or kick out for — finally — open 3s.

Herro was frustrated that he got stuck in the corner in crunchtime of Game 1 because he was often the second-side action, relying on the first sequence of the play call to complete before he could get in the mix. Spoelstra redrew the plan, getting Herro invovled at stage one so that he could always make an impact, even when he didn’t actually touch the ball.

“I’ve had to learn that slowly as I’ve gotten more older, more mature,” Herro said. “Obviously, I want to score, but sometimes just running off the ball and creating those overreactions allows my teammates to get easier baskets, and then from there I can kind of open up for myself. But definitely trying to create those overreactions is a big part of what we’re trying to do right now.”

It helped create one of the biggest moments of the series that almost gave the Heat a chance to win. After Herro drew a foul on Jarrett Allen and it was overturned with 39.4 seconds left and Miami down 5, the Heat won a jump ball at center court. Davion Mitchell brought the ball down while Allen was on the floor after falling from the jump ball. Herro was on the weak elbow while Jović was hiding in the corner, so Herro cut toward the ball to draw all the help toward the middle. That opened up Jović for the easiest drive-and-kick 3 of the night, but he bricked the shot and lost the chance to potentially tie the game on the final possession.

Jović’s return changed the equation for Miami, serving as a quick-acting connector on both ends in crunchtime. Wiggins was played off the floor in this game, sitting out the entirety of the fourth quarter in favor of Jović. His coach said he puts stress on the game with his skill, able to do a little bit of everything with enough height to actually pull it off. He was the puzzle piece Game 2 Spo had to find Wednesday, someone who didn’t take momentum out of the ball when it came his way.

For the first three quarters, Miami’s half-court possessions were a nauseating series of hesitations leading to reluctant shots that had no interest in falling through the net. The ball did not deserve a soft landing after such a mediocre process to get there. As much as Herro and Adebayo can put momentum in the ball, it is lost if the connecting pieces between those two hubs stall out. Jović showed in Game 2 that he is part of the blueprint for getting the offense back into this series.

“That’s how we got to play. Everybody plays fast now and it is the way the basketball should be played, and I feel comfortable,” Jović said. “It’s quick decisions when you’re on the floor and you got to be smart about it.”

Alec Burks was already taken out of the rotation. Haywood Highsmith shot lights out and defended well, though he had the check engine light on offensively when he didn’t immediately shoot off the catch. Spoelstra will have a tough task figuring out how to use Wiggins on Saturday, presumably a lot less than Jović and Highsmith after the way things have gone the past week. The coach said each game is different and his decisions were based on what the game presented, so there will likely be another wrinkle in the rotation come Game 3.

But he has figured out how to deploy Herro against this Cleveland defense, so now the Cavs have to respond. They had a dramatic 3-point advantage in this game, something that can change if they start to lay bricks in Brickell. Garland, old friends with Herro, thinks Cleveland can handle what comes next.

“It’s physicality. It’s nothing,” Garland said. “I think we’re doing a really good job on him. He’s going to shoot like 40 shots to beat us. But if one guy’s going to beat us, then he beats us.“

Then what are the keys on offense?

“Pick on Tyler Herro and take care of the ball,” Garland said. “Don’t play in tight spaces and pick on their weak defenders. Go at them.”

Game 2 Spo got his shot and nearly made it. Miami is down 0-2 but trending in the right direction. Before the fourth quarter Wednesday, it seemed like it would take a miracle for the Heat to get back into this series. But once Spoelstra has a handle on things, any team is in trouble.

“It has been a couple of games where we’re right there, and now we just have to figure out how to get it over the top,” Spoelstra said. “It’s going to take more, it’s going to take collectively us digging deeper, and we have respect for who they are, what they can do. But we have to be better.”

(Photo: Jason Miller / Getty Images)

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