Telling reporters “there’s no regrets on our end,” and “Denver was the better basketball team in this series,” Miami coach Erik Spoelstra lauded the efforts of the Heat throughout their postseason run, which ended with a loss to the Nuggets Monday night.
DENVER — Miami Heat coach Erik Spoelstra didn’t hide from the truth after watching the Denver Nuggets end his team’s championship dream following a 94-89 loss in Game 5 of the NBA Finals on Monday night.
“There’s no regrets on our end,” Spoelstra said after the game. “There’s just sometimes where you get beat, and Denver was the better basketball team in this series. That’s about as hard — I don’t know how long it would take me to go through the autopsy of this final game, but I would say that it will probably rank as our hardest, competitive, most active defensive game of the season, and it still fell short.”
In the end, NBA Finals MVP Nikola Jokic, guard Jamal Murray and the rest of a hard-nosed Nuggets group proved to be too much for Spoelstra’s overachieving team. Spoelstra and his players didn’t take solace in the fact that they became just the second No. 8 seed ever to reach The Finals, but Spoelstra did respect the fact that they got beat by a Denver team, coached by Michael Malone, who has developed the same kind of culture that has defined the Heat for almost three decades under the leadership of Heat president Pat Riley.
“You have to tip your hat to them,” Spoelstra said. “I said it, but they are one hell of a basketball team. They play the right way, they compete, they are well-coached and they have a strong culture. So for this season, they deserve this.”
The Heat don’t make excuses as an organization, but the reality is they looked like a team that ran out of gas against a superior opponent. Heat star Jimmy Butler, who imposed his will on games throughout the postseason, carrying the Heat at various points, finished just 5-for-18 from the field and struggled to find any rhythm offensively, aside from a few clutch shots down the stretch.
Arguably the most important sequence of the game came with less than 30 seconds to play and the Nuggets clinging to a 90-89 lead.
