Erik Spoelstra keeps making all the right moves to help Heat find a way
The Heat #TheHeat
Knicks fans learned quickly last month not to ever underestimate or count out this plucky Heat squad, or their Hall of Fame-bound head coach.
Nikola Jokic and the Nuggets are a far more formidable and title-ready foe than the Knicks. They’d also been 9-0 inside their high-altitude home during this year’s playoffs with an eight-point lead to open the fourth quarter Sunday night, looking to make it 10 straight, including the all-important first two games of the NBA Finals.
Erik Spoelstra, Jimmy Butler and the Heat figured out a way to do it yet again, and they somehow head back from the mountains to the beach with the coveted split all road teams hope to achieve in these scenarios, coming back in the final quarter for a 111-108 victory to swipe in Game 2 in Denver.
Spoelstra, a two-time champion coaching in his sixth NBA Finals, pressed the right buttons once again after his team was overpowered in the series opener, both early in the game with the reinsertion of benched veteran Kevin Love into the starting lineup and then sticking with a few struggling bench players — most notably Duncan Robinson and Kyle Lowry — to open the fourth quarter.
“We came to play, I thought that was the main difference,” said Gabe Vincent, who scored a team-high 23 points.
“It’s the Finals, we got one on their home court, and it’s time to go back to the 305 [area code],” center Bam Adebayo said. “Gotta protect home now.”
see also 
And now, you’d fully expect that Tyler Herro, the 2022 NBA Sixth Man of the Year and the Heat’s best 3-point shooter in the regular season, to play Wednesday night in Miami for the first time since breaking his hand in Game 1 of the playoffs against the Bucks.
The Heat vowed to revert to attack mode and get to the rim more often after attempting only two free throws in Game 1, and they improved to 18-for-20 from the stripe.
Seeing more of their good looks from 3-point range falling also has been tantamount to their success throughout this postseason.
Max Strus — 0-for-9 from deep in a scoreless opener — nailed four first-half treys, helping the Heat open an 11-point lead in the first quarter. After a collective 13-for-39 showing from beyond the arc in Game 1, the Heat nailed nearly 50 percent (17-for-35), with six players connecting multiple times.
One of those players was Love, as Spoelstra made the switch to reinsert the former All-Star big man — ahead of Caleb Martin, the breakout star of the Eastern Conference finals against Boston — after Love was fully benched for the final two games against the Celtics and all of the opener in this series.
“I had every intention to play him in Game 1, and things just kind of went a bunch of different ways. Nothing seemed to look right, including my decision-making,” Spoelstra said. “But yes, he brings that veteran, decorated playoff championship-level experience, and you can’t really quantify what that means except for that he’s been here, he can infuse a bunch of confidence in the guys. He just has a timeliness of his winning plays.”
The wondrous Jokic finished with a game-high 41 points, but it was Denver’s bench fronting the Nuggets to a 23-6 splurge in the second quarter to open a 15-point cushion, although the Heat whittled it to six by halftime.
Jokic committed a clear-path foul on Adebayo as the Heat center attempted to haul in one of those trademark outlet passes that Love killed the Knicks with time and again in the second round, enabling Miami to pull even.
But the two-time MVP hit a spinning shot in the paint off a Brown steal, and Jokic totaled 18 in the third with an old-fashioned three-point play, a coast-to-coast drive to the hoop through heavy traffic and two free throws in the final minute of the period to push the lead back to eight.
While Vincent and Strus kept the Heat in it early, Spoelstra stuck with Lowry and Robinson to open the fourth that enabled Miami to retake the lead, with the latter sinking two long 3-pointers and netting 10 in a 13-2 run to start the quarter.
The Heat missed only one of their first 11 shots in the quarter, and then Butler finished off the Nuggets with eight of his 21 in the final minutes, with the win sealed when Jamal Murray’s jumper rimmed out at the buzzer.