LOS ANGELES – The final impression leaving the court Saturday in Utah was of a woozy Haywood Highsmith being helped into the locker room, after a nasty head-to-head, whiplash-like collision at the close of a loss to the Jazz at the Delta Center.
Whether the Miami Heat can regain their footing again has become a prime source of concern as they move on to a pair of games in Los Angeles on this five-game trip, Monday against the Clippers, then Wednesday against the Lakers.
Footing particularly stands as an issue with forward Jimmy Butler, who was lost for the night in the third quarter of the loss to the Jazz with a right-foot injury in the same game he returned from a four-game absence due to a strained left calf.
With Butler, if it isn’t one leg, it’s the other. Just as it seems with the Heat, if it’s not one injury, it’s another.
Saturday, that meant Kyle Lowry out with a head contusion, Caleb Martin out with a sprained right ankle and Josh Richardson out with lower-back discomfort.
It reached the point with convoluted rotations in the loss to the Jazz that RJ Hampton started at guard but played only his initial 8:06 stint and Nikola Jovic opened at forward and played only 9:50.
As has been the case the past two weeks, that upped the ante on Bam Adebayo and Tyler Herro to the degree that the Heat were unable to win in Utah even with Adebayo closing with 28 points and 16 rebounds and Herro scoring 25.
“We’ve been in situations like this before,” Adebayo said. “We’ve had guys out. For us, we have a deep bench. I feel like we can win any game with whoever is out there. Everybody knows the system, everybody’s locked in and we believe in one another.”
The loss in Utah came after the Heat won four in a row in Butler’s absence. That, Herro said, means no excuses in the final three games of this trip that opened with Thursday night’s victory over the Golden State Warriors and concludes with a Friday game against the Phoenix Suns.
“We won four straight before that,” Herro said of this latest Butler ailment. “So that’s not an excuse.”
The difference is the Heat now face a week against the likes of James Harden, Paul George, LeBron James, Anthony Davis, Kevin Durant, Devin Booker and Bradley Beal, before returning home for a Jan. 8 game at Kaseya Center against the Houston Rockets.
Ahead of Saturday’s game, Spoelstra quipped that he pays little attention to the NBA’s mandated injury report, since it requires teams to report even the most negligible of injuries, even listing players whose status is “available.”
“I literally do not look at that injury report,” he said. “I mean, it looks absurd and it’s really so we don’t get our hands slapped by the league.”
Now, it’s almost as if the Heat’s injury report has turned into a theater of the absurd, with Butler, Herro and Adebayo having played together in only eight games this season, including the one Butler left early on Saturday.
“I mean obviously we want him out there,” Spoelstra said of losing Butler against the Jazz, “but we had our opportunities.”
The Heat are 5-3 in Butler’s absence. In addition to missing the four recent games with the calf strain, he also has missed one for rest, one for personal reasons and two with a sprained right ankle.
Highsmith has missed 11 games, with the Heat 5-6 in his absence, four games with a knee sprain, six with a lower-back contusion and one on Christmas due to illness.