The Heat lost 118-104 to the Warriors Wednesday night, but that wasn’t the team’s low point of the evening: Miami teammates Jimmy Butler and Udonis Haslem got into a shouting match and had to be separated in the third quarter.
Fingers were pointed, players tried to diffuse, and a clipboard was thrown to the ground in frustration by coach Erik Spoelstra.
It was the team’s second straight loss and fourth in seven tries. Things spilled over as Golden State opened the second half on a 19-0 run. During a timeout in that stretch, words were exchanged and eventually Butler and Haslam had to be separated.
The setback cut Miami’s lead in the Eastern Conference race to 1.5 games over the Bucks and Celtics.
“Listen, our guys really want to win basketball games and we have guys that work extremely hard,” Heat guard Kyle Lowry said. “The passion comes out. The fire and the emotions come out sometimes. But like I said, to us it’s nothing. We conversated and had a conversation and we continue to build.”
“We have bigger things to accomplish,” Spoelstra said. “But we do want to play better. Everything else across the board. It starts with our leadership, our veteran players have to lead and then we just have to play better. We got to play more consistently, and that’s really all the discussions were. I know how it could look on the outside, but as I mentioned before, that is more our language than playing without passion or without toughness or without multiple efforts.
“You can use moments during the season to catapult you. You can galvanize together over frustration and disappointment. Teams can also go the other way. I don’t see that with our group. I don’t see that with our locker room. But we have needed a kick in the butt.”
The Heat next host the Knicks on Friday.
