MIAMI — The two-time defending champion Heat may already have their eyes on claiming basketball’s top prize for a third straight season, but that doesn’t mean they are going to overlook their final meeting of the season against the Nets on Tuesday night at AmericanAirlines Arena.
“All we have to know about Brooklyn,” Heat coach Eric Spoelstra said after his team beat the Knicks 102-91 Sunday afternoon, “is we haven’t beaten them this year, including the preseason.”
The Nets have won all five games they have played against the Heat this season — three that counted, including last month’s 96-95 triumph, when Shaun Livingston deflected away Chris Bosh’s inbounds pass intended for LeBron James in the game’s final seconds — and two preseason blowouts.
Now Brooklyn comes to Miami sporting the best record in the Eastern Conference since Jan. 1 at 32-13 and possibly representing the biggest challenge to the Heat making it to a fourth straight NBA Finals given how much the Pacers have struggled in recent weeks.
But while the Heat undoubtedly would like to erase the zero from their win column against the Nets, they said, win or lose, the outcome of Tuesday’s game won’t change their perception of how a potential playoff matchup against the Nets might play out.
“It just means they’re stiff competition,” Bosh said. “[But] the playoffs are a different game. If it gives them confidence, it gives them confidence. But for us, we have supreme confidence that if we come, prepare and do what we’re supposed to do, we feel we can beat anybody.”
While the Nets have undergone a transformation both in their style of play and their success over the course of the season, the Heat are one of the few teams against which they had success both while playing with a traditional big lineup early in the season and with their current small-ball look.
But because of the veteran experience Brooklyn possesses — particularly in the persons of longtime Heat nemeses Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett — it surprises no one in Miami that once coach Jason Kidd’s Nets had some time to figure things out, they turned their season around.
“They’re a good team,” Bosh said. “We expected them to do that. We know how it is, coming together and struggling to get the chemistry right. But once you get it right and figure out what you’re doing, they’re pros, and so we expect a tough fight, and we owe them.
“We haven’t beaten them yet. So we have to do this for ourselves, too, because they’re another potential playoff matchup. We’ve got to come in and prove it to ourselves.”
One person who didn’t have much to say about the Nets, however, was LeBron James.
“I really don’t have no thoughts right now on the Nets,” James said after scoring 38 points on Sunday. “I’m ready to get home and lay down.
“I’ll worry about the Nets on Tuesday. I haven’t even started preparing for them yet.”