Miami Heat players react on the team bench while down to the Cleveland Cavaliers during the second half of Game 3 of the NBA Playoffs at Kaseya Center on April 26, 2025, in Miami. D.A. Varela [email protected]
The Miami Heat already made NBA history earlier this month. Now, the Heat needs to make more league history to avoid being eliminated in the first round of the playoffs for the second straight season.
After becoming the first 10th-place team in either conference to make the playoffs from the NBA’s play-in tournament by winning back-to-back elimination road games, the Heat now needs to become the first team in league history to rally from a 0-3 hole to win a best-of-seven playoff series. NBA teams that have dropped the first three games of a best-of-seven series have gone on to lose the series every time (0-158).
The Eastern Conference’s eighth-seeded Heat fell behind 0-3 in its first-round series against the East’s top-seeded Cleveland Cavaliers in humiliating fashion, dropping Game 3, 124-87, on Saturday afternoon at Kaseya Center. It marks the Heat’s most lopsided playoff loss in franchise history, surpassing a 36-point loss to the San Antonio Spurs in Game 3 of the 2013 NBA Finals on June 11, 2013.
“I told the guys in the locker room, we wanted to be here,” Heat guard Tyler Herro said after the Game 3 defeat. “We were the No. 10 seed, we had two play-in games to win on the road. We could have let go of the rope then, we could have lost one of those games. But we wanted this, we wanted to be in the playoffs.
“This is our reality right now. But like I told the guys, it’s not time to let go of the rope. We’re going to play until the final buzzer, whether that’s next game, Game 5, 6, 7 or another series after this. We just got to keep playing. That’s what we’re paid to do and that’s who we are as an organization. We want to compete and we’re not going out 4-0.”
The Heat hasn’t lost a season 0-4 many times before, as it has been swept in a best-of-seven playoff series just twice in franchise history — in the first round against the Chicago Bulls in 2007 and in the first round against the Milwaukee Bucks in 2021. Only one of those sweeps came after Erik Spoelstra became the Heat’s head coach prior to the 2008-09 season.
“Look, this is our third elimination game that we’ve played in 10 days,” Spoelstra said following Sunday’s practice, with the Heat looking to avoid being swept in Game 4 on Monday at Kaseya Center (7:30 p.m., TNT and FanDuel Sports Network Sun). “So we just went to work, working on solutions. We put ourselves out there to be in this series. We wanted to be in this series, we fought to be in this series and this is what happens with competition. They’re a good team and this game can be humbling.”
Just forcing a Game 7 after going down 0-3 in a series is rare.
Only four teams have done it, with the last time coming when the Boston Celtics dug themselves out of a 0-3 hole to force a Game 7 in the 2023 East finals against the Heat. But the Heat won Game 7 in Boston to avoid the historic collapse before falling to the Denver Nuggets in the 2023 NBA Finals.
“I’ve been part of a team that was up 3-0 and then in the blink of an eye, we were going into a Game 7,” Heat center and captain Bam Adebayo said, referring to that experience. “So obviously there’s still a chance. As captain, I’m going down swinging. I don’t care. We’re going to ride it until the wheels fall off.”
The Heat has been overmatched in this series, as it has now been outscored by an average of 22.3 points through the first three games. After all, the Cavaliers did finish 27 games ahead of the Heat in the East standings this regular season.
The Cavaliers, which posted the NBA’s best offensive rating this regular season, have had little trouble against the Heat’s defense. Cleveland has posted the league’s top offensive rating through the first week of the playoffs, as Miami’s two worst single-game defensive ratings of the season have come in this first-round series.
Making the Cavaliers’ Game 3 rout especially impressive is the fact that they did it without All-Star guard Darius Garland, who missed the contest because of a left big toe sprain and whose status for Game 4 is also in question because of the injury. Even without Garland, Cleveland totaled 60 paint points and threw down 11 dunks on Saturday.
“That’s not who we are defensively,” Spoelstra said. “We all have great respect for them as an offensive team. But we’re at our best when we’re taking away easy baskets. You saw some highly uncharacteristic things on our part. Pocket passes to no rotations to dunks or layups right at the rim without any kind of disruptiveness or physicality. So we have to bring all of those things, but it has to be with intention. There has to be thought behind it. We can’t just run around trying to hit people. But we have to have a level of physicality in the paint. When we’re at our best, we have that.”
Adversity is nothing new for this season’s Heat team, which dealt with Jimmy Butler’s ugly exit and then endured a 10-game losing skid in March before finding a way to make the playoffs for the sixth straight year.
“We went through a lot this year,” Heat guard Davion Mitchell said. “The 10-game losing streak, but we never let go of the rope. I think that it made us better in the long run. People said we were supposed to be home two weeks ago and we ended up winning two road games. So anything can happen. We just got to take it one game at a time. We made history before, so let’s keep trying to make history.”
Despite now facing long odds that no NBA team has ever overcome, the Heat is still holding out hope that it can extend this series — even as it stares at a daunting 0-3 series deficit against one of the league’s elite teams.
“Just take it one game at a time,” Herro said. “There’s definitely a path to it. We know it won’t be easy. We just got to clean some things up and we’ll look hopefully a lot better than we did [Saturday on Monday]. That’s our path to Game 7 — winning one at home and then obviously going to get one in Cleveland.”
▪ Terry Rozier (sprained ankle) and Kevin Love (personal reasons) remain out for the Heat for Game 4. The rest of Miami’s roster is expected to be available.
