As Miami Heat star Bam Adebayo and head coach Erik Spoelstra led the team to an impressive 118-112 win over the Eastern Conference's No. 1-seeded Detroit Pistons, the victory featured a trait that had been missing this season. While the Heat had been back to basics in the last week with high-scoring wins, Thursday night showed a massive improvement in winning in a variety of ways.
Before the current four-game winning streak, the team had lost eight of its last nine contests, displaying Miami's high-scoring and free-flowing offense stalled, being unable to course-correct. As the Heat have led the league with seven games scoring at least 140 points, the win over the mighty Pistons showed that even with an offensive rating of 108.3 points scored per 100 possessions, which would be the second worst in the league this season, the team still came out to win.
For productive third-year forward Jaime Jaquez Jr., who scored 19 points in Detroit, winning in a multitude of ways is a “sign of a great team.”
“I think that’s the sign of a great team is winning in a lot of different ways,” Jaquez said, via the team's YouTube page. “That’s something that we’ve been trying to do. You can’t just win all the time scoring 140…So you’ve got to find ways to win, and that’s what winners do. For us as a collective, that’s something that we’ve really been building toward.”
This has been harped on by Spoelstra a myriad of times that he wants to see Miami win, even if “it's in the mud.”
“The games aren’t always going to go to our identity, and that’s OK,” Spoelstra said. “More often than not, it will. I mean, this is going to continue to get better. But if it’s in the mud or if it’s not going fluidly, you still have to find a way to overcome.”
‘Versatie' Heat start 2026 with a bang as team bests Pistons
During the aforementioned skid, the Heat knew they could be better by emphasizing the trait that has been the basis of the team for countless years, its defense. Despite shooting 43 percent from the field and committing 20 turnovers, the team was active against the Pistons, forcing 21 turnovers, while scoring 24 points off of them.
“It means that we’re very versatile,” Norman Powell said, scoring a game-high 36 points against the Pistons. “Not every night, I’ve said it before, we’re going to score 140. Everybody wants to see that. Great. But we have some good teams here that play defense and are physical. They’re going to take us out of our first, second, and third options, so we’ve got to be able to adjust and work the ball around and get the looks that we want.”
Miami looks to keep it going, but there's no doubt that the team beating the top seed in the East to start 2026 bodes well, potentially for the rest of the season.
“It’s just a good start to 2026. We’ll take it,” Spoelstra said. “That’s a very good team. Obviously, they’re coming off a West Coast trip. But this is the NBA, so we will definitely take it.”
The Heat are now currently at 19-15, looking to keep the winning ways going this weekend in a back-to-back on Saturday against the Minnesota Timberwolves and Sunday facing the New Orleans Pelicans.
