Heat falls to Hawks in Atlanta to drop to 15-14, with Jimmy Butler still out. Takeaways from loss

The Miami Heat’s up-and-down season continues.

Just two days after Tyler Herro’s game-winning jumper lifted the Heat to a quality win over the Magic in Orlando, the Heat fell to the Atlanta Hawks 120-110 on Saturday afternoon at State Farm Arena. That game-to-game inconsistency has had the Heat hovering around .500 all season, dropping to 15-14 after Saturday’s defeat.

Following a back-and-forth first half that included nine lead changes and six ties, the Hawks entered halftime with a three-point lead.

It remained a close game throughout, but the Hawks led for the entire second half before going on a game-deciding run in the final minutes.

After entering the fourth quarter in a nine-point hole, the Heat cut the deficit to one with 3:28 to play.

But that’s the closest the Heat got, as the Hawks (17-15) responded by going on a game-clinching 9-0 run to pull ahead by 10 points with 1:08 left.

The Heat missed five straight field-goal attempts during this important stretch, ruining its chance of completing the fourth-quarter comeback.

“We don’t want to play from behind,” Heat center Bam Adebayo said. “That’s playing with fire. For us, it’s really trying to go for the lead and try to keep the lead.”

The Hawks’ duo of Jalen Johnson (28 points, 13 rebounds, five assists and two blocks) and De’Andre Hunter (26 points, five rebounds and two assists) combined for 54 points, while Hawks guard Trae Young dished out 15 assists.

“It was really tough also giving them some relief points — in transition, then offensive rebounding — at key moments going down the stretch,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said. “Those were probably the deciding factors.”

Five Heat players finished with double-digit points led by Herro, who totaled 28 points, seven rebounds and 10 assists in the loss.

The Heat is right back at it on Sunday, closing the three-game trip against the Houston Rockets at Toyota Center (7 p.m., FanDuel Sports Network Sun) to complete its sixth back-to-back set of the season.

“That’s the NBA schedule,” Herro said of the quick turnaround. “It is what it is, so we’ll be ready.”

Five takeaways from the Heat’s loss to the Hawks on Saturday:

Life without Jimmy Butler continued for the Heat, but the hope is he’ll be back on the court soon.

Butler missed his fourth straight game on Saturday and has also been ruled out for Sunday’s contest in Houston. He remains in Miami going through his “return to competition reconditioning” process after dealing with what the team listed as a “stomach illness.”

The Heat’s expectation is that Butler will rejoin the team when it returns to Miami for the start of a three-game homestand. The Heat begins the homestand on Wednesday against the New Orleans Pelicans, which is the target date for Butler’s return.

Butler has been dealing with a flu-like illness, according to a source close to the situation.

With Butler also out Sunday against the Rockets, he’ll have missed 10 of the Heat’s first 30 games by the end of the trip.

After Saturday’s loss, the Heat fell to 4-5 in games without Butler this season.

Butler has been at the center of trade speculation this month, with ESPN’s Shams Charania reporting Wednesday that Butler prefers to be traded out of Miami.

Sources involved with Butler and the Heat both said that he has not formally requested a trade. But Butler’s relationship with the team has become somewhat strained in recent months after the Heat opted not to give him a two-year, $113 million max contract extension this past summer.

Butler has averaged 18.5 points, 5.8 rebounds, 4.9 assists and 1.3 steals per game while shooting a career-best 55.2 percent from the field in 20 games this season. He leads the Heat in most advanced metrics this season, including estimated plus/minus, win shares and box plus/minus.

The Heat was also without Josh Richardson (right heel inflammation) and Dru Smith (left Achilles surgery) on Saturday in Atlanta.

The Hawks were also short-handed, as they played without Dyson Daniels (illness), Bogdan Bogdanovic (left lower leg contusion), Kobe Bufkin (right shoulder injury management), Onyeka Okongwu (left knee inflammation) and Cody Zeller (not with team) on Saturday.

Again without Butler, the Heat stuck to a similar rotation to the one it has used for the last few games in his absence.

The Heat opened Saturday’s game with a lineup of Herro, Duncan Robinson, Jaime Jaquez Jr, Haywood Highsmith and Adebayo. It marked the third straight game that Miami has used this starting lineup.

The Heat then went with a bench rotation of Nikola Jovic, Kel’el Ware, Terry Rozier, Pelle Larsson and Alec Burks against the Hawks.

Unfortunately for the Heat, Atlanta’s reserves outscored Miami’s reserves 59-27 on Saturday with the help of Hunter’s 26 points off Atlanta’s bench.

The Heat’s five-man bench rotation combined to shoot just 8 of 24 (33.3 percent) from the field and 3 of 14 (21.4 percent) from three-point range in the loss.

The only available Heat players who did not get into Saturday’s game were Kevin Love, Josh Christopher, Keshad Johnson and Isaiah Stevens.

The Heat’s defense struggled against the Hawks’ uptempo pace.

The Hawks entered Saturday playing at the NBA’s second-fastest pace this season and that speedy style seemed to affect the Heat, even if the numbers don’t show it.

The Heat and Hawks each scored 17 fast-break points on Saturday in a game that was played at a relatively moderate pace of 99 possessions per 48 minutes. That’s a pace that would rank 21st in the NBA for the season.

But Spoelstra and Heat players pointed to the Hawks’ pace as one of the factors behind the loss.

“It felt like it was the pace,” Spoelstra said when asked why the Heat was trailing for most of the game. “Those relief points were really the difference. If you just take everything else, it was going to be a great basketball game. But it seemed like they had the advantage the majority of times they pushed it.”

The Hawks totaled 120 points on 51.2 percent shooting from the field and 15-of-37 (40.5 percent) shooting from three-point range while scoring 56 paint points.

The Heat is now 0-5 this season when allowing 120 or more points.

“Just having a sense of urgency to get back,” Herro said of what the Heat’s defense could have done better against the Hawks’ pace. “You don’t really know or feel the pace until you’re in the game and they’re actually doing it. So just a little sense of urgency to keep getting back.”

Without Butler, the Heat struggled on offense when Herro was on the bench and struggled on defense when Adebayo was on the bench.

In the 35:55 that Herro played on Saturday, the Heat scored at an elite rate of 118.4 points per 100 possessions. But in the 12:05 that Herro was on the bench, the Heat scored just 76.9 points per 100 possessions.

In the 36:32 that Adebayo played on Saturday, the Heat limited the Hawks to 108.3 points per 100 possessions. But in the 11:28 that Adebayo was on the bench, the Heat allowed the Hawks to score 140 points per 100 possessions.

While Herro finished three rebounds short of a triple-double, Adebayo recorded 17 points, 10 rebounds, two assists, one steal and two blocks in the loss.

Add Spoelstra to the list of NBA coaches who spoke out in the wake of the Sacramento Kings firing head coach Mike Brown.

“I texted with him last night. It’s just a really sad state of our profession,” Spoelstra said during his pregame media session on Saturday. “It seems like I’m making comments about coaches far too often. Somebody on our staff mentioned that there’s been almost 15 head coaching changes in Sacramento since I’ve been head coach. They’ve had some really good head coaches come through there. Mike and I go all the way back to the beginning, we were both video coordinators. He’s a great coach and what they did there is really hard to do. They had been losing for 15, 20 years since Rick Adelman was there. He changed the culture and made the playoffs, you stick with it.

“Some of our best moments have been when we’ve lost or we struggled, and you all get in a room and basically the organization says: ‘Figure it the [expletive] out. There are no changes.’ So I feel for Mike having to go through that. He’s the same guy who was Coach of the Year less than 24 months ago. This league is hard. You have to go through adversity together as an entire organization if you’re going to break through and get to the other side. But, yeah, it sucks.”

The Kings, which entered Saturday with a 13-18 record and in 12th place in the Western Conference, fired Brown on Friday.

Spoelstra, who is in his 17th season as the Heat’s head coach, is the NBA’s second-longest active tenured head coach with one team behind only San Antonio’s Gregg Popovich.