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Heat season ends with a short-handed whimper in 118-84 loss in Boston

Ira Winderman, South Florida Sun Sentinel on

Published in Basketball

BOSTON — No, they didn’t have enough.

No, there wasn’t a next man up.

And perhaps most significantly, there was no Playoff Jimmy.

So, in the end, a playoff crash and burn for the Miami Heat, their season coming to an end with Wednesday night’s 118-84 loss to the Boston Celtics at TD Garden.

In retrospect, coming away even with their single win in the best-of-seven opening-round Eastern Conference playoff series probably was a degree of overachievement.

Lacking Jimmy Butler and Terry Rozier for all five games of the series, and then also without rookie Jaime Jaquez Jr. for Game 5, the Heat simply did not have nearly enough against the playoff’s top seeds, with the Celtics this time getting 25 points apiece from Jaylen Brown and Derrick White and 16 from Jayson Tatum.

 

While Heat center Bam Adebayo fought the good fight in playing every minute of the first three quarters, with 23 points, a 6-of-19 night from the field Heat guard Tyler Herro failed to provide the needed support system.

A year ago, with Butler at his Playoff Jimmy top of his game, the Heat stole away from a Game 7 at TD Garden with the Eastern Conference championship.

This time, Butler (knee), Rozier (neck) and Jaquez (hip) had only a distant view of Wednesday night’s carnage, remaining back in South Florida, where lockers soon will be cleared at Kaseya Center.

With the Celtics jumping to an 18-point lead at the end of the first period and then pushing the margin to the second, it left the Heat’s “we have enough’ and “next man up” mantras feeling as empty as the night and the series — and even the season.

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