After the Miami Heat dropped its 10th straight game, an exasperated Bam Adebayo implored his Heat teammates to continue pushing amid the team’s longest losing streak since 2008. “You can’t let go of the rope now,” Adebayo said after the Heat fell to the Houston Rockets on March 21 at Kaseya Center to lose its 10th consecutive game. “To me, I just think why quit? That’s unreasonable. To me, that’s something that’s in your character to be a quitter and obviously I’m not a quitter so I’m not going to let my teammates quit.”
Adebayo, who is in his second season as the Heat’s captain, didn’t let his teammates quit. The Heat ended its skid at 10 games and has since won three straight to find its footing after one of the roughest stretches for the franchise in more than a decade. The Heat’s latest victory came in a 122-112 win over the Atlanta Hawks on Thursday night in Miami to improve to 32-41 this season. “I bring the same positive optimistic energy every day,” Adebayo said of his leadership style, with the Heat now set to embark on a three-game trip that begins Saturday against the Philadelphia 76ers (7:30 p.m., FanDuel Sports Network Sun). “It doesn’t matter what we’re going through.
“If we’re on a 10-game losing streak or if we’ve won seven straight, you got to keep that same energy because, like I preach to my teammates, you never know what can happen on the other side. You’re thinking about letting go of the rope. And then the one time you’re like, ‘I’m not going to let it go,’ you get a breakthrough.”
Outwardly, Adebayo remained positive through it all. Internally, Adebayo questioned himself during the skid. “At this point, you got to go through it on your own because nobody can save you, nobody can help you,” Adebayo, 27, said. “For me, it was really just looking in the mirror. Like, how can I be better? What can I change as a captain, as a leader to where we have this breakthrough and we make progressions?
“So I just really had to look myself in the mirror and be like, listen, we’re going to figure it out one way or another. We’re going to figure out solutions, we’re going to figure out ways I can be better on the court, off the court, be a better captain, be a better teammate, how can we have team gatherings to bring the guys together more. It was everything and obviously we had a breakthrough.”
Adebayo has stayed solid on the court even amid the losing, averaging 20.4 points, 9.3 rebounds and 3.9 assists per game while shooting 52.2 percent from the field and 38.3 percent on threes in 26 games since the start of February. He has also continued to anchor the Heat’s defense. Heat coach Erik Spoelstra labeled Adebayo as “unquestionably our emotional leader,” admitting that he sometimes worries Adebayo is carrying too much responsibility between what he’s tasked to do and off the court.
“We feed off his emotion, we feed off his leadership, we feed off his voice, we feed off his inspiration and that’s a monumental responsibility,” Spoelstra said. “I’m always thinking about him. I want him to be able to recharge his batteries on the day in between because it’s different if you’re the emotional leader for the team and everybody is looking to you for that type of energy. You got to recover because other guys get to show up for the game and just play.
“He’s embraced it, he wants all of this and he’s doing a tremendous job with it and he’s finding different ways to recover on the off days, to make sure that he has that kind of energy the next time. I see him getting stronger with more energy as it’s going on, which is amazing to see.” Arguably the most emotional night for the Heat so far this season came Tuesday in Jimmy Butler’s return to Miami. The Heat crushed Butler and the Golden State Warriors 112-86 at Kaseya Center for the second victory of its current three-game winning streak, as Adebayo played a leading role with a game-high 27 points and quality defense on Butler.
Butler walked back to the Warriors locker room at the end of Tuesday’s game without exchanging any handshakes or words with his former Heat teammates and coaches. Adebayo and Butler never acknowledged each other that night except for when they were forced to during the flow of the game.
“I’m not shocked. It is what it is,” said Adebayo, who is in his eighth NBA season after being drafted by Miami in 2017 and is under contract with the Heat through the 2028-29 season. “It’s a business at the end of the day. And he has a Golden State Warriors jersey on. We have a Heat jersey on. I don’t take it personal. We’re out there to do our job anyways. So if you don’t want to speak, we don’t speak and that’s fine. We’re going to get out here, we’re going to compete, win or lose the game and we move on.”
But the way it ended and the fallout from that ending is unfortunate, as Adebayo and Butler teamed up to produce one of the most memorable chapters in Heat history. As a leading duo, they helped lead the Heat to three Eastern Conference finals appearances and two NBA Finals appearances during their five full seasons together before the disgruntled Butler was traded to the Warriors on February 6.
Leading up to the trade, the Heat suspended Butler without pay three times and Butler went public to express his desire to be dealt after the Heat declined to offer him the max contract extension he sought last offseason. Butler also feuded with Heat president Pat Riley and the franchise on the way out, telling Taylor Rooks of Turner Sports this week: “I have nothing to say to Pat. And Pat better have nothing to say to me.”
“I’m sad to see it go that far,” Adebayo said, reflecting on Butler’s ugly breakup with the Heat. “Guys are going to make decisions off of whether they want to take care of themselves and I’m all for that. I’ll never be mad at a guy who wants to go get his money. But to me, it ended as a bad sting between the organization and him as a whole. You got him and Pat going at it and stuff like that. I just feel like it ended badly. At this point, we just got to move on.”
The Heat moves on in hopes of making the playoffs for the sixth straight season despite a turbulent regular season. But considering its current position of 10th place in the Eastern Conference with only nine regular-season games left to play, the Heat will likely need to win two play-in tournament games just to qualify for the playoffs as the East’s No. 8 seed.
“When you’re in failure, when you’re in that funk, it’s kind of like when you get a cold,” Adebayo said. “You start to remember the days when you could just breathe normally. It’s like, damn, how do I get back to that?” The Heat and Adebayo feel like they’re finally breathing normally again.
“To me, it’s those types of moments where I feel like you’re going to get tested in life and obviously life tested us for damn near all of March,” Adebayo said. “Life really tested us and really was like, what is this going to be? To me, man, not letting go of that rope is one of the reasons we’ve won three games. … For us, it was just not letting go of the rope.”
