Miami Heat’s season goes down in flames, but they enjoyed the journey to mediocrity

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MIAMI — For a few hours in the sky, everything seemed fine. Thirty thousand feet below them, the fallout from the betrayal of a franchise cornerstone, a 10-game losing streak — it was all too far in the distance for the Heat to care.

They left a roller coaster of a regular season behind to become the first 10th seed to make it out of the Play-In Tournament. They were reveling in it on the team plane.

Flying to Cleveland, the Heat knew the treacherous path ahead. But they were deluded into believing they could pull it off. For three hours aboard the charter jet, it was theirs for the taking.

“It’s a plane ride that I’ll remember the rest of my career, and that’s why we’re irrationally thinking, like, ‘Hey, this is going to continue,’” Miami coach Erik Spoelstra said after the Heat lost the Cavs series by 122 points, the biggest sweep in NBA history. The Cleveland Cavaliers won 138-83 on Monday to end it, a seemingly meaningless Pelle Larsson 3 short of the NBA playoff record.

Spoelstra said there was nothing in their preparation since they returned to Miami to suggest this could ever happen: a franchise playoff-record 37-point defeat followed by a near-NBA-record 55-point loss in Game 4. It seemed unfathomable to anyone who watched that fourth quarter in Cleveland.

They had something figured out. This was turning around for the Heat. Not even close. The furthest thing from close we’ve ever seen.

Now, Spoelstra will spend his summer overanalyzing every little detail to try to solve this confounding onslaught.

“There’s no way I could have predicted that,” he said. “It shouldn’t have been like this, I know that for damn sure.”

A week earlier, sitting on that plane, Spoelstra and his team thought things were coming together. He knew it was irrational. He didn’t care. He felt alive.

The spark of competition was coursing through his veins. The chance to get to the postseason, where he has outfoxed coaches for years. Where his roster ground down the opponent for thousands of minutes of grueling playoff basketball. That’s the stage where he feels the most comfortable. It’s usually where he feels the most alive.

But the struggle made him feel truly alive. It felt different. He mentioned it before they beat the Atlanta Hawks to make the playoffs. He mentioned it again after it was all over. Spoelstra faced the toughest season of his coaching career, and it made him feel more in touch with his place in the vocation he has transcended for nearly two decades.

So he believed. Even after going down 0-2 to Cleveland, he still believed. His team could have folded at so many points of the season, but it never got cynical with the pursuit of being afloat. All the evidence was there for a vintage Miami counterpunch, one of those wins you just can’t believe is happening until it’s over.

That never came. He could live with that. You want something to truly matter. This run didn’t matter the way the Heat wanted it to. As Spoelstra said, that team is hardwired to compete for the ultimate prize.

“But (making the playoffs) was something that was hard earned,” he said. “Can’t pay for it, can’t get it on Amazon.”

The fun is over now. The Heat’s roller-coaster season has come to a merciless end.

To the fans of #HEATNation – thank you for your support throughout the year ❤️ pic.twitter.com/z9rOnNwP2J

— Miami HEAT (@MiamiHEAT) April 29, 2025

Two games ago, there was a sense of hope for the Heat. Tyler Herro and Bam Adebayo figured out the fourth-quarter offense, Davion Mitchell scored at will, and it seemed like Miami had a road map back into the series. Then the Cavs jammed the GPS and slashed their tires.

Miami looked unprepared and incapable of handling the moment. The Heat could not execute anything. Ball movement ground to a halt. Defensive presence could barely hold up through two actions. Transition execution looked simply lost.

Herro and Adebayo have played so well together this year, but that went out the window. As Spoelstra put it, the Cavs showed his team why it wasn’t ready for this stage.

This was the most un-Spo-like team the franchise has rolled out in a playoff series. Does it mean there will be tangible changes?

“We will find out, but we’re not going to change our standard,” Spoelstra said. “But I also understand that Tyler and Bam have taken on the mantle, and it’s a slightly different role than they’ve had previously. You got to work through that.”

This season was a necessary step back. Jimmy Butler tried to burn everything down when he didn’t get his extension, and they had to toss him out to save the franchise.

Pat Riley has always sought to follow up a big splash by tossing another boulder into the pond. The ripples of the Butler era — and the Heat’s repeatedly remarkable runs to the NBA Finals — are finally petering out. So, how does Riley create the next big wave in Biscayne Bay?

Before the Damian Lillard Achilles tear, the options looked grim. Kevin Durant is the obvious target, but he’ll turn 37 by training camp. Zion Williamson and Trae Young are expected to be available as the New Orleans Pelicans and Hawks bring in new front-office regimes while holding on to their head coaches. Teams knew coming into the season that Giannis Antetokounmpo was going to be the big fish they hoped would swim their way.

Now the race is on. Will the Milwaukee Bucks play ball? Time will tell.

Miami also has to decide how to handle extension negotiations with Herro, who can receive a three-year, $150 million extension this summer that would start in the 2027-28 season. But if Herro waits until next summer, he could sign a four-year, $207 million extension that would earn him slightly more money and guarantee an extra year.

Contract extension windows tend to serve as a statement about how much a team values a player, but the ball is more so in Herro’s court, timing-wise. That would be beneficial for the Heat front office, as Herro had an up-and-down postseason run trying to lead a reconfigured rotation that rarely looked in sync against Cleveland.

Herro made significant strides as a main offensive option and overall leader this season, averaging career highs of 23.9 points and 5.5 assists per game en route to his first All-Star appearance. He looked like a star the franchise can build around in the Play-In and Game 2 of this series, but he was completely shut out of the last two games as Miami’s offense cratered.

Miami could elect to retool the roster to provide more playmaking support for Herro and run this group back one more season, giving him a full year to run the offense and prove whether he merits a max extension.

The Heat are below the luxury tax but have Mitchell entering unrestricted free agency after a productive playoff run. He was their only other viable playmaker besides Herro and Adebayo and the only good guard defender throughout the postseason. He is worth retaining if Miami wants to make the playoffs again.

But this doesn’t feel like a time for continuity in Miami. Adebayo knows that. He knows Heat president Riley is simmering. When asked what’s ahead for the offseason, Adebayo said he didn’t know but then clarified he knows it’s something he doesn’t see coming.

“There are going to be a lot of changes this summer, just from my point of view, understanding how the guy with the silver hair works,” Adebayo said. “So, just be prepared for that.”

This team might be torn apart in the next few months and forgotten to history, a meaningless row in a basketball reference page. It will be remembered for the Butler divorce and not much else. For Spoelstra, it was so much more than that.

“But it’ll be a story that nobody really cares about because of how it ended. I get it, but I feel for the locker room,” Spoelstra said. “This group has put a lot into this season, and to be able to overcome a lot of things and then to have those two Play-In games where most people would say, ‘What’s the big celebration?’ Mediocrity, but it was a lot of fun.”

For Adebayo, who was one of the few Heat players on the floor who had seen the finals, that plane ride mattered. As he said, you never know who will be in the locker room next season. Taking in those moments is what makes this bigger than basketball.

“You got to enjoy those small moments,” Adebayo said. “Because you never know when you get those back.”

(Photo of Tyler Herro shooting over Donovan Mitchell: Sam Navarro / Imagn Images)

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