The top-seeded Miami Heat haven't been playing great basketball of late, and their collective frustration reached a tipping point Wednesday night.
Tempers flared during a Miami timeout amid a 19-0 third-quarter run by the Golden State Warriors, who were without Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green. It all started with Jimmy Butler, who appeared to go after Erik Spoelstra. A video short courtside captured the Heat head coach responding to Butler by seemingly saying, "What? You think I'm going to (expletive) fight you?"
From there, longtime team leader Udonis Haslem stepped in and eventually needed to be separated from Butler. The trio all launched verbal jabs for nearly a minute and the often mild-mannered Spoelstra even slammed his clipboard on the court.
Speaking with the media after Miami's 118-104 loss at FTX Arena, Spoelstra addressed the fiery sequence.
"We have bigger things to accomplish," Spoelstra told reporters, per ESPN. "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."
Spoelstra added: "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 Philadelphia 76ers, Milwaukee Bucks and Boston Celtics all trail the Heat by 1 1/2 games for first place in the Eastern Conference. Six of Miami's final nine regular-season games are against teams currently in the playoff picture, including a trip to Boston on March 30.
